Records Desk

Everything on this site starts with a request. Someone at the desk writes to the agency that holds the record, cites the statute, waits out the clock, pays the fee, and reads what comes back. This page is about that part of the job.

What the desk does

The Records Desk is run by Rozanne Powell, a paralegal and records researcher. She files the requests, on paper or through whichever portal an agency prefers, and each one goes into a ledger with the agency, the statute, the response deadline and every reply. When a deadline passes, a follow-up goes out. When an agency withholds something without the particularized reason the law requires, we say so in writing, and if that doesn’t move things, we pursue the review the statute provides. Some of those exchanges become stories in their own right. The Las Vegas and Orange County pieces below are two.

We pay what the law allows. Copying and processing fees are part of the cost of the work, and we pay them promptly, because an unpaid invoice is the fastest way to get a request closed. Where a statute gives news-media requesters a fee category, or gives the public a waiver, we ask for it, and we ask for both when both apply.

When records arrive they are inventoried, checked against what was asked for, and read for personal information before anything is quoted. A production that shows up as three thousand photographs and a dozen hours of body-camera video takes weeks to work through. We would rather be slow than sloppy.

Where we are working

As of September 2026 the desk has requests pending or recently completed with police departments, sheriffs, courts, prosecutors and medical examiners in nine states:

What has come back so far includes complete investigative case files, recorded police interviews, incident reports, trial transcripts and court files, and medical-examiner case sheets. The reporting built from them appears below as it clears review.

How we publish records

Documents go up next to the reporting that relies on them, with their provenance stated: which agency produced them, under which request, on what date. Before anything is published it goes through a privacy review. We remove Social Security numbers, dates of birth, driver’s-license and account numbers. We remove the home addresses, phone numbers and personal e-mail addresses of private people, which means witnesses, jurors, relatives and bystanders. We do not identify minors or victims of sexual offenses. We do not publish post-mortem or crime-scene images of the deceased. And every allegation is attributed to the document that makes it. A charge is not a conviction, and we write accordingly.

Records-based reporting

For records custodians