Audit finds police department backlog of 20,000 public information requests

The Austin Police Department recently had a backlog of more than 20,000 public information requests, causing some requests to wait for more than a year to receive a response, according to a recent city audit.

That audit also found APD has far less public information staff to handle requests than the rest of the city despite receiving roughly twice as many requests each year than all other departments.

Those findings were included in a presentation on the audit during Wednesday’s meeting of City Council’s Audit and Finance Committee.

The Office of the City Auditor found that in general, the city needs to improve the quality and turnaround time for information requests, which are required by state law to be completed promptly and equally. Other findings of the audit report were that the city is inconsistent in its procedures to respond to requests.

To address those problems, the auditor’s office recommended centralizing the management of public information requests (PIRs) to create consistency, devoting more resources to fulfill requests properly, improving training and communication around handling of PIRs, and specifically developing a plan to eliminate APD’s backlog of unfulfilled requests.

The imbalance of public information resources was magnified by the finding that APD has only six staffers to handle the 20,000 requests the department receives in a typical year compared to the 120 staffers available to handle the 10,000 requests received by the rest of the city’s operations.

Those numbers have held up across a recent five-year period where the auditors found that from 2018 to 2022, APD received more than 82,000 PIRs compared to just over 39,000 for the rest of the city. In physical terms, the workload of managing physical paperwork equals 393 pounds divided between 20 city staffers for every one APD staffer needing to handle 821 pounds of documents.

Deborah Thomas with the city’s Law Department said the city’s management team agrees with the audit’s findings and recommendations. She said the first step in addressing those issues is forming a leadership team with members from the city and APD PIR staff among others, with that group looking at immediate and long-term ways to improve the way information requests are fulfilled.

“Some of those issues are going to be more long-term. One of the major issues is going to be to get the APD side more staff. They do have a lot more (public information) requests than the city site does … how to do that is going to be one of our biggest challenges,” she said, noting that standardized training for both groups will help to eliminate gaps in the process for responding to requests.

Aside from adding more staff, Thomas said the large backlog facing APD staff could be addressed in part by finding a way to automate some searches for information. She said many of the requests received by police are for standardized, recurring types of information that can be handled in a less labor-intensive way.

In response to Council Member Mackenzie Kelly’s inquiry about what assistance or decisions are needed from Council, Thomas said the leadership group would need to hold its initial meetings and form its plan before moving forward with requests for city resources.

Council Member Alison Alter noted that funding in the new city budget could provide some tools and staff time to make some of the needed changes.

“We did just in the budget add positions related to data management, and I think as we improve the data presentation and the openness of the APD data more generally, that may relieve some of the pressure on PIRs,” she said. “Improving those data processes also may be part of the solution for the PIRs.”

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