As part of the activism that my team and I do, I like to follow public records laws and the latest activity happening around public records.
This is especially necessary now that I am running Project Accountability, a group of 70 folks who have signed up to help hold their local public health officials accountable for the crimes committed in 2020 and beyond.
So much information can be learned by just asking.
Just Ask
In a recent newspaper story, I saw that the City of Palm Springs, California has been trying for months to get records related to a school in nearby Palm Desert named College of the Desert. The school said it would provide records two weeks after the upcoming election. The city did not find that acceptable and is now suing the school over the matter.
Someone involved in the matter obviously wants to have more information before the upcoming elections about someone else involved in the matter. Perhaps that person even wants to hold the other accountable. Elections are good at doing that. It might be a bunch of political shenanigans, or it might be an earnest effort at holding a misguided band of fellows accountable. The distinction is not relevant to my purposes, for in either example, both you and I are able to gather knowledge and to steel ourselves for the battles in our own lives.
I was eager to have a look at the original records request and the legal documents from the City of Palm Springs. I could poke around courthouse websites to see if any data existed, and I could poke around on other online databases. Such searches can be time-consuming and take a great deal of effort. They do not always promise to be fruitful. Admittedly, that particular search is likely to be fruitful since there are only two courthouses that this lawsuit would take place in — the country courthouse or possibly, but not likely, in the nearest federal courthouse.
Rather than search court records, I sometimes try a different approach. An Andrew Jared was mentioned as counsel for the City of Palm
Springs in this matter, making this a particularly useful time to employ this alternate method.
The Way That I Asked
Here’s what I did:
1.) Find the attorney involved.
Don’t just use Google for this, try a better method, which will find you the attorney’s contact information more reliably than any common search engine.
2.) Go to the search function of the state bar association, and find the phone number and email for that attorney.
Every state has a bar association. You may even end up with a private cell phone number from this search.
3.) Contact the attorney asking if he would kindly send you the court documents you are looking for.
Truthfully, that attorney doesn’t even owe you a response, but a lot of attorneys will respond to a properly phrased request.
With that article naming Andrew Jared as counsel for the City of Palm Springs, I gave him a call, left him a message, and sent him an email. If I had had his cell phone number from the search, I would have text messaged him too.
I also took it a little further.
4.) I filed a quick records request with the city for the text of the lawsuit and the text of the records requests that the city made to the college.
I took it a little further yet.
5.) I sent the same to the College of the Desert.
Out of the three, one of these options will likely pan out, and I will consequently get the documents I have asked for. I also may get a duplicative response, which is good, because it confirms that neither of the opposing government entities were holding out on me.
It Is Actually Not Very Complicated
Now, this may all sound very complicated, but it really isn’t. This is especially true when you get used to asking for the source documents of anything meaningful to you that you read in the newspaper. All you need to do is to get this in your head, “I trust the media so little that I want to verify anything vaguely important to me that they report on.” You probably believe that already, but maybe you do not recognize how easy the process of verifying can be when done through a public records request.
This took me all of ten minutes of effort to make this happen. As some of the more engaged participants in Project Accountability know, a records request can generally be sent to any email address at a governmental organization and still be fulfilled. It can also just be a sentence or two long.
I am about to share with you the text of my records request, just so you see with your own eyes the simplicity of making a request.
The Text Of My Records Request
Suspecting Jared might write me back, I did not send this request until the next day, because why trouble the government officials or myself when a lawyer can spend five billable minutes sharing the file with me. However, after giving him half a work day to at least acknowledge my email, I moved on with it, and presumed him unresponsive. Most of the time, I just send the request at the same time so that I don’t need to come back to the topic. Here is the exact text of what I sent.
—
Dear Sir or Madam,
I am writing to request the following documents under open records laws:
1.) All court filings related to the Palm Springs records requests to College of the Desert over the past year;
2.) All records requests sent by Palm Springs to College of the Desert over the past year.
Please confirm receipt.
Thank you for your time.
Respectfully,
Allan Stevo
—
What Is My Motivation For Doing This?
Palm Springs is a town I have never given much thought to, and College of the Desert, I had never heard of until reading that article about the lawsuit.
What is my motivation for wanting documents so unrelated to the things I know about or care about? Well, I want to learn from others and see how others do public records requests. I almost always learn something new in such situations.
Also interesting to me is when government fights government. Such happenings are almost always impassioned and filled with trickery. Once in a while, if you pay attention to such fights, you have the opportunity to learn a technique you may never have come across any other way.
So, with ten minutes of reaching out with a records request, I get a peek into some expert legal techniques that might have cost me $25,000 or $50,000 in legal fees to learn about. But more important than the money, learning these techniques would have required me to fight my own energy-draining and time-consuming legal battle.
Instead of going through all of that, I get to pop some popcorn, and curl up with the response to my records request.
Truthfully, I neither pop popcorn nor curl up with a records request, but I’m sure you get the imagery of what I’m saying — I get to relax by making it a point to observe what’s happening around me and to learn from what others are doing.
And you might just benefit from that behavior of mine too.
What Is In It For You?
“Allan Stevo, how does this nerdy hobby of yours benefit me?” you may ask.
That may happen one day when you are in the middle of a big battle, and you reach out to me, and I share with you some stratagem that I came across some time over the past several decades of fighting these fights and watching these battles. I was a wee lad the first time I was marched into battle as the armor bearer of a man wiser, braver, and more tenacious than me.
And I would like to think some of it rubbed off on me.
I have no fear of the ego deflation that it causes some to sit at the feet of one more learned. I want to learn as much as I can, and will train under anyone who knows what I desire to grow in. I seek to help that person’s efforts in any way that I can. After all, why should he bother to help me when there is nothing in it for him? I seek to engage my learning as quickly as I can in order to grow.
Face Masks Hurt Kids is a lot like that. It is me taking the research of wiser minds, compiling that research into a collection so neither you nor I need to do that research ourselves. It is research which proves that face masks hurt kids. We probably both already know that by being the slightest bit intuitive on whether our bodies need a ten cent polypropylene mask from Wuhan province strapped to our faces in order to work properly, but sometimes it may also help to have demonstrable science on our side.
Don’t Stop At Knowledge
It isn’t about stopping there. To stop there is mere intellectual masturbation. It is about taking those learnings and applying them as quickly as possible, as effectively as possible, to grow and to champion your values.
Knowing is not enough.
Having good values is not enough.
You owe it to your values to win.
You owe it to posterity to win.
Face masks do not just hurt kids. They hurt everyone. And the existing mask mandates need to be banished from our lives permanently, recognized for the lie that they are.
That is one piece of work in front of us. And when that lie has crumbled, other fortresses of deceit will follow.
——
I send out encouraging words each day by email. You can signup to receive those by tapping here. (https://realstevo.com/search) When you signup, I will also send you a free report explaining why Duck Duck Go is the absolute worst search engine for censorship, and what search engines you can use that will not censor.
