Records Watch

How we count

Days to a real reply

The number of days between the date a request was filed and the first substantive response from the city. Automated acknowledgments are excluded: the portal sends a receipt immediately, and counting it would make every request look answered within minutes. Deciding which messages are automated is our judgment, applied by a documented rule, not the city's label.

Median, not average

We publish the median wait rather than the average. A single request that sits unanswered for months pulls an average far away from what a person filing a request typically experiences. The median says: half of requests were answered faster than this, half slower.

Status

The city's detail page states a disposition for each request (for example, "Full Release" or "No Records Exist"), and that wording is shown here verbatim, in the city's own words. Beside it, we show our own normalized status: every request's disposition mapped onto a single vocabulary so requests can be counted together. Anywhere that normalized status appears, on its own or as a count, it is marked as ours. The portal's listing-page progress stage is a separate piece of wording it also keeps; we do not yet mirror it here.

What appears here, and what does not

Requests are published one of four ways. Most show subject, dates, and status. Some also show the request text as filed. Some are counted in the statistics above without being named, because naming an open line of reporting would tell the subject of that reporting what we are asking. Some are not shown at all.

Correspondence is withheld unless each message has been individually reviewed for publication, because city replies routinely name people who never chose to be published. Documents appear only after a named person has cleared them.