The Seattle Police Department is violating the public records law by imposing unnecessary delays on anyone who files more than one request, a King County Superior Court judge ruled Monday.
Judge Sandra Widlan ruled the police department must stop the practice, which has caused yearslong waits for releasing public information to Seattle Times reporters.
The Times sued the city in January 2025, accusing it of failing to abide by an earlier settlement that limited the police department's batching” or “grouping” requests for public records from a single person.
“The Seattle Police Department has repeatedly and systematically violated the state Public Records Act, and it's very gratifying to have the judge rule in our favor on that point,” Times executive editor Michele Matassa Flores said.
A spokesperson for the Seattle City Attorney's office said, "We are evaluating the order and assessing next steps."
Times reporter Mike Carter filed five requests in 2023 seeking communications and other records related to favoritism allegations that eventually led to former Seattle Police Chief Adrian Diaz’s firing. Carter’s requests were trapped in a vortex of delay.
“We've already waited 29 months for simple calendar and travel records that could have helped the public understand more about the conduct of the man who was police chief when we started this reporting,” Matassa Flores said. “We hope, starting immediately, that Seattle police will begin following the law the way it was intended."
The practice the judge slapped down had allowed city records clerks to ignore all but the first request until it was fulfilled and deemed closed. In Carter’s case, 19 months passed before he received records from his first request, while all four in line behind it saw no progress at all, according to court records.
Widlan ruled that grouping records requests amounts to an administrative regulation that leads to longer waits for responses, and therefore is “legally invalid.” The city also routinely issued arbitrary estimates for completion of the other requests, often claiming it would take years to complete them without actually assessing the work involved. The judge ruled that was another violation of the Public Records Act, and ordered the city to stop.
Widlan denied the city’s request to throw out portions of the lawsuit, but also denied The Times’ request to strike down the city’s public records policy in its entirety. During oral arguments in a Kent courtroom Friday, Widlan hinted that she was reluctant to throw out the city’s policy as a whole because the Times had only demonstrated that this problem was occurring at the police department.
Jessica Goldman, an outside attorney from Summit Law Group hired by the city, argued the high volume of public records requests the police department receives necessitated the grouping policy.
“There are not enough hours in the year for the Seattle Police Department to respond to all of the requests it receives,” Goldman said.
Without grouping, she said, requesters would be waiting even longer for public records from the police department.
The police department is at one end of a fire hose that is only getting bigger every year,” Goldman said.
But Times lawyer Kathy George argued the agency cannot limit the number of requests a person submits, and “inconvenience does not excuse strict compliance” with the Public Records Act.
Widlan foreshadowed her ruling at Friday’s hearing.
“I don’t know that the Seattle Police Department gets to say, ‘We’re drowning here and doing the best we can,’ to the court, who has to apply the Public Records Act,” she said.
The Times’ Matassa Flores said access to police department records is essential for citizens to appraise the department’s performance.
“[The police department’s] conduct and their decisions affect people’s lives in a really deep and lasting way,” she said. “It’s one of the most important agencies we cover at The Seattle Times. They have the single worst record, it’s safe to say, with respect to transparency and openness.”
Each of Seattle’s last two police chiefs exited under a cloud of scandal. Carmen Best, who stepped down in September 2020, was under fire for her department’s abandonment of its East Precinct, which fell under protester control during the height of the nationwide 2020 Black Lives Matter protests. A homicide within the Capitol Hill Organized Protest zone punctuated the debacle.
But Best and then-Mayor Jenny Durkan had set their phones to automatically delete messages, erasing their communications and along with it, vital public records that would have illuminated the police department’s decision to abandon its station. The city paid $2.3 million to settle lawsuits with two record clerks who blew the whistle on the deleted messages.
Diaz was fired in December 2024 after then-Mayor Bruce Harrell’s office determined the police chief had given preferential treatment to a close personal acquaintance. Carter’s requests at the heart of the lawsuit aimed to unearth more about that situation.
The Times' lawyer argued the city, and specifically its police department, have afforded scandal-plagued leaders the cover of time. The delays in providing records — in some cases taking years before even processing them — mean the information is released when the public's interest has faded.
In 2022, the city agreed to pay The Times $200,000 to settle a lawsuit over the deleted Durkan text messages and vowed to improve its responsiveness to public records requests. A year later, new problems led to a prelitigation settlement with the Times to avoid a new lawsuit. The city agreed to reform its request-batching practice, but The Times said it fell short, so it was at the center of Monday’s ruling.
Despite its promises to improve, in 2024, the city settled a lawsuit for more than $50,000 brought by independent journalist Glen Stellmacher over its failure to provide text messages he requested about SPD’s covert infiltration and intelligence operations during the 2020 protests.
The Times is seeking attorneys fees, reimbursement of costs associated with the lawsuit and up to $100 per day, per request for public records that have not been fulfilled. It also still wants the records Carter has been waiting years to receive. George said the sum The Times will ask the court to approve is still being calculated.
Widlan will rule on those details at a later date, after attorneys for both sides have submitted briefs. At that point, the judge will also set dates for the police department to stop grouping multiple requests and stop issuing placeholder estimates for when they will be completed.
Seattle Times news researcher Miyoko Wolf contributed to this report.
© 2026 The Seattle Times. Visit www.seattletimes.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
