As part of some volunteer work I'm doing with Lucy Parsons Labs, I submitted a FOIA request to every single state's largest city, asking for search warrant records that would likely exist on complaints for search warrants, the warrants themselves, or from any audit. About 100 requests in total.

After two months, only two cities have sent me their search warrant records. All other states have given me rejections saying:

1. The records are on paper and never transcribed.

2. The records are digital, but there's no way to query from a frontend.

3. The records are digital and queryable, but the agency considers the use of queries "creating reports", where tons of states have case law backing this up.

4. Nothing, because they haven't responded yet.

So far I've received three enormous fee estimations of ~500k, ~400k and ~150k. Obviously not affordable.

Chicago is one of the few cities that sent records (though, it took a year). They've sent three separately sized files for the same timeframe - 11k rows, 9k rows, and 20k rows. The data is messy, and there is some very important info missing from their records. Can't speak too much about it yet, since I'm still confirming the reasons. It's been blindingly frustrating trying to get a consistent message about whether the data is even accurate.

All this goes to show that police agencies don't make records on search warrants even remotely easily available to the public, and we have no way of gauging whether our constitutional rights are being upheld throughout the US. It's honestly very sad.

If you want to support this work and our other projects, please consider a donation to Lucy Parsons Labs: https://lucyparsonslabs.com/support/