cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/53950202

Election Day is on Tuesday November 3rd.

Get organised today here: https://www.vote.org/

Be aware of your rights and course of actions: https://lemmy.world/post/53334632

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/53772954

The early voting for the Midterms is now available in many places. You can early vote at a polling place or you can use mail-in voting.

Get organised today here: https://www.vote.org/

If you choose to vote in person, either now or on election day, be aware of your rights and course of actions: https://lemmy.world/post/53334632

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/53285519

The early voting for the Midterms is now available in many places. You can early vote at a polling place: https://www.eac.gov/voters/register-and-vote-in-your-state

Or you can use mail-in voting: https://www.eac.gov/voters/national-mail-voter-registration-form

It's highly recommended to avoid election day voting in person, and vote early.

Some mildly interesting numbers in this one.

Police in Bend, Oregon are responding to a report of an active shooter at Silver Rail Elementary School on Thursday afternoon.

A large police presence has been reported at the school, officers said in a post to X, adding that people should please avoid the area.

In an update to media, Sheila Miller, communications manager for Bend Police, said around 1 p.m. local time police received multiple 911 calls about an active shooter in the school. Miller said that there are "multiple victims" and the shooter was shot and killed, potentially by a bystander. Two people have been transported to a local hospital, and their status is currently unknown.

The settlement followed revelations during pretrial discovery that state officials had received numerous abuse complaints from boys being held at the facility as well as staff starting in the the 1990s and through the 2000s, yet repeatedly failed to notify law enforcement. Instead, according to court records, agency leaders chose to “deal with a situation such as this internally.”

Two members of the Eugene, Oregon, Police Department in a photo posted to the department’s Facebook page on Aug. 26, 2026. Screenshot: Eugene Police Department via Facebook

How much does it cost to get more information about a cop who punched someone in the face?

If you guessed anything lower than $2.5 million, you’d be wrong — at least according to the city of Eugene, Oregon.

In August, the local news outlet Double Sided Media filed a public records request for records about police officer Justin Peckels, which focused on potential misconduct between 2018 and 2026. Peckels has been the subject of community complaints, including for punching a resident in the face during a traffic stop, making the records vital for oversight and their release clearly in the public interest.

The city’s response is beyond belief. In its response to the request on Monday, the Eugene Police Department claimed searching for records and processing the request would take at least 44,816 hours of staff time and cost approximately $2,484,599.04. (A separate request by the outlet for similar records concerning a former police officer, Eric Klinko, was met with a comparatively modest estimate of $195,869.52, for a grand total of nearly $2.7 million for both requests.)

The open invoice by the City of Eugene, Ore. dated Aug. 1, 2026, in response to Double Sided Media’s request for public records relating to a police officer accused of misconduct. Screenshot: City of Eugene

“Once the City receives payment of $2,484,599.04 staff will continue processing your request,” the letter from the department’s public records division read. “If the actual cost of processing your request exceeds the amount you have paid the City, you will be required to pay the difference before the City will provide the records you have requested.”

Peckels’s file is either the largest in the world, or city officials have intentionally maintained their databases in such a way as to ensure fulfilling public records requests is prohibitively expensive. The city’s response points, at a minimum, to the latter. It justified the multimillion-dollar price tag by claiming it couldn’t narrow the custodians whose records it would need to search, despite the targeted nature of the request, and maintained it must search all records of all city employees, past and present.

By that logic, if someone ever worked in Eugene’s parks and recreation department, their records could contain responsive information about police misconduct, and must be manually pulled and reviewed, one by one.

This goes far beyond incompetence. It’s an intentional effort to make a response artificially voluminous — and cost prohibitive — to intimidate the journalist into dropping it entirely.

Normally, agencies are required to search the specific custodians most likely to possess responsive records, not every groundskeeper or clerk on the city payroll. If the city were acting in good faith, officials would have asked Double Sided Media to help them identify the most likely record-holders, not take it upon themselves to cast a citywide dragnet as its first step.

What makes Eugene’s money-grab particularly galling is its technology double standard. While it apparently can’t invest in efficient search software, the police department recently signed a two-year $342,000 contract for nearly 60 AI-powered Flock automated license plate readers. This project was so secretive that the ACLU of Oregon had to sue the city for records about how the cameras were being used and demonstrates, among other inclinations, the city’s eagerness to employ sophisticated software to deploy against residents.

Yet that technological sophistication disappears as soon as a journalist requests public records about the department’s internal accountability process, and simple keyword searches are suddenly cumbersome.

For small newsrooms, a $2.5 million invoice is effectively a gag order that was never actually about covering costs, but bullying the requester to drop their inquiry.

Troublingly, Eugene’s $2.5 million bill is not an anomaly.

In 2015, the Department of Defense told a Freedom of Information Act requester, who was asking for records on tools used to preserve data on seized devices, that fulfilling their request would take 15 million hours and cost $660 million.

The same year, the Drug Enforcement Administration told a requester it would cost $1.46 million for records about the DEA’s role in the search and capture of the Mexican cartel boss Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman.

In 2019, the Army tried to charge $300,000 to release military base water test results for the presence of toxic chemicals. The Army agreed to waive the exorbitant fee after facing intense backlash.

The list goes on and on.

Luckily, records requesters seeking federal documents have a defense against these capricious invoices. Recent FOIA amendments aim to ensure if an agency misses its response deadlines, it can’t charge most fees.

At the local level, however, these protections disintegrate. While Oregon grants agencies the discretion to reduce fees when the disclosure would benefit the public, agencies routinely ignore these provisions.

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For small newsrooms like Double Sided Media, a $2.5 million invoice is effectively a gag order that was never actually about covering costs, but bullying the requester to drop their inquiry (all while Eugene Police Department launches its own “press” initiative to document its policing). It also sets the precedent for using this chilling tactic on any journalist or watchdog as it sees fit.

[

Read our complete coverage

Chilling Dissent ----------------](https://theintercept.com/collections/chilling-dissent/)

Double Sided Media is rightly appealing the fee estimate, and it should prevail. But cities like Eugene will continue these efforts unless lawmakers across the country force agencies to adopt fee caps, mandate public-interest fee waivers for journalists, and require agencies to procure software that allows them to respond to records requests in an efficient and timely manner.

Until then, police departments will likely continue to issue multimillion-dollar ransoms for their records — weaponizing the public’s right to know into another avenue for police to operate with impunity.

The post Oregon Police Are Charging a Local News Outlet $2.5M for Records About One Cop appeared first on The Intercept.

From The Intercept via This RSS Feed.

The law bans the sale of any “hemp-derived cannabinoid product” with more than 0.4 milligrams of total THC per container, which is most hemp-derived products such as edibles, tinctures and beverages. It was set to take effect in November, but Congress pushed its effective date to Dec. 11.

(emphasis added)

Oregon will no longer require prospective foster and adoptive parents to agree in advance to affirm a child’s sexual orientation or gender identity.

The change follows a settlement between the Oregon Department of Human Services and Jessica Bates, who was represented by the conservative legal group Alliance Defending Freedom. The state has removed the affirmation requirement from its rules, though officials say they can still consider a child’s individual needs when deciding where to place them.

University of Oregon researchers have a new study that says the mobile crisis counseling service CAHOOTS — Crisis Assistance Helping Out On The Streets — diverted far more calls from the Eugene Police Department than first thought.

The letter, acknowledged last week by Pakseresht in an email to the hospital’s more than 2,000 employees, comes after years of upheaval. The state’s 600-patient psychiatric hospital has seen a rotating cast of top leaders since 2020, a troubling pattern of patient and staff injury and more than one unexpected patient death.

A strengthening El Niño is expected to play a major role in Oregon’s weather over the coming months, increasing the likelihood of warmer-than-normal temperatures and potentially bringing a wetter winter to parts of the state, according to the latest outlook from the National Weather Service’s Climate Prediction Center that was released Thursday.

Neighborhood is SE Hawthorne, I guess near 20th Ave.