It's not "every document the police" have, it's every document that a specific office in the police department has. It's an enormous amount of documents, but it's pretty clear that the tactic that the OPA is using is "produce documents for the duo more slowly than they can destroy them." I doubt that there's a stipulation that says the request must be completed and the records maintained until the request is complete. "Oh, it took 5 years to process your request, but due to department policy, we had to destroy all documents from the first year of your request." That's a far grosser violation of the spirit of the public access law than anything a public citizen can do.

And to bring the point back to the unions: the union signed a contract mandating that records be destroyed after 3 years. Not archive, not digitize, but destroy? That destruction isn't to ease job performance, it's to ease long-term liability for the police to the detriment of the general population.

>I doubt that there's a stipulation that says the request must be completed and the records maintained until the request is complete. "Oh, it took 5 years to process your request, but due to department policy, we had to destroy all documents from the first year of your request."

That's an interesting point, and I don't see that that sort of behavior is specifically prohibited anywhere in Chapter 42.56 RCW.