Run A License Plate Reader Records Campaign, With Me Filing Alongside You

You can run a Must Exist campaign by yourself. The method is free, the request templates are free, and plenty of people have taken them and filed on their own. If that is your plan, take them and go. Nothing on this page is a gate in front of that.

This page is for the other situation. You have a deadline, or a docket, or a grant, or a council vote in six weeks, and the thing standing between you and the records is not knowledge. It is the forty hours of drafting, filing, tracking, and arguing with custodians that sit between a good request and a usable answer.

That is the part I do with you.

What is a Must Exist campaign?

It is a ninety-day engagement where I draft, file, and run three public records requests against the agency you name, then hand you the results as one organized file instead of a folder of scanned attachments.

The three requests are the same three the method is built around. The use policy that governs the cameras. The query audit log that shows who searched and why. The sharing roster that lists every outside agency reaching into your city's system. Each one is anchored to a written rule the agency adopted for itself, so the custodian is being measured against a standard already on the books rather than a standard you invented.

When the responses land, I set the three side by side and write up what the gaps are. That comparison is the deliverable. A policy promising quarterly supervisor review, an audit log showing no reviews, and a roster naming agencies the council never approved is a story, a filing, or a dataset depending on who you are. Any one of those three documents alone is just paper.

What does the campaign include?

• Three rule-anchored requests, drafted against your specific agency and its specific written policy, not filled in from a generic form.
• Verified citations. Every statute and retention schedule I cite gets checked against the primary source text. Nothing goes out with a number somebody remembered.
• Adversarial review before filing. I read every draft the way a hostile records custodian would and fix what they would use against it.
• Stall handling. When an agency goes quiet, overcharges, claims an exemption it has not named, or asks you to narrow a request that is already narrow, I write the response.
• Tracking. Every request, date, reply, and deadline in one place, so you can see the state of the campaign without reconstructing it from your inbox.
• The comparison writeup at the end, plus the underlying records organized so somebody else can follow your work.

I answer agency mail within one business day. That number matters more than it sounds like it should, because most of what kills a records campaign is not a denial. It is a clarification request that sat unanswered for three weeks and gave the agency a reason to close the file.

Who is this for?

• Journalists working a surveillance story who need records that will hold up under an editor's read, and who do not have three weeks to spend learning one state's exemption structure.
• Researchers and professors building a dataset across several agencies at once. This is the case where the campaign earns its keep most clearly, and I have written a whole section on it below.
• Defense counsel who need the policy, the audit trail, and the sharing roster as an organized file rather than a pile, and who need the provenance of each document documented.
• Residents facing a camera contract renewal, who need the paperwork before the vote rather than after it.
• Commissioners and staff who have to cast that vote and would rather read their own agency's records first.
• Nonprofits and advocacy groups running the same campaign in more than one city.

Why does this matter more for academic work?

Because a records project across twenty agencies is only usable if the twenty requests were written the same way.

Here is the problem a template alone does not solve. If you ask one department for its query audit log and another for its search history, you will get back two things that look similar and are not. Worse, you will not be able to tell whether that difference is in the agencies or in how you asked. Every inconsistency in how you asked becomes noise you cannot separate from signal later. That is the failure that quietly ruins multi-jurisdiction records research, and it usually shows up months after the requests went out, when the data will not line up and there is no way to re-run it.

A campaign fixes that by holding the request language constant and moving only what has to move, which is the state citation and the agency name. You get responses that compare. You also get a written record of exactly what was asked, when, and under which statute, which is the methodology section you will need anyway when a reviewer asks how the corpus was assembled.

If your project is bigger than one agency, tell me the scope and I will price the whole thing rather than selling you three requests at a time.

What does it cost?

Fifteen hundred dollars for the ninety-day campaign, covering all three requests and everything above.

What that buys is judgment and labor, not documents. The documents are free and always will be. What you are paying for is that the requests are written to survive a custodian, that somebody answers the agency within a day, that the stall gets a response instead of a shrug, and that at the end you have a file rather than a folder.

Once the first request goes out the door it cannot be unfiled, so the engagement is not refundable after that point. Before then, ask and I will refund it. That is the whole policy, and I would rather say it plainly here than bury it somewhere you find later.

Agencies sometimes charge their own fees for copying or staff time. Those are the agency's charges, they go to the agency, and you decide whether to pay them. I will tell you when a fee is normal and when it is a stalling tactic dressed up as an invoice.

How long does it take?

The campaign runs ninety days. You should expect the first production inside thirty.

Those two numbers are different on purpose. Thirty days is roughly how long a functioning agency takes to answer a well-drafted request. The sixty days after that exist because the interesting part is almost never the first response. It is the follow-up when a production arrives with a column missing, the letter when an exemption gets claimed without being named, and the second request to a neighboring agency once the sharing roster tells you who else was in the system.

Some agencies answer in a week. Some take the full ninety days and then some. I cannot promise you an agency's timeline and neither can anyone else honestly selling this.

What happens when the agency stalls?

It will, and the shapes it takes are predictable enough to name in advance.

You will see a fee estimate that arrives large and vague. You will see a request to narrow something already narrow. You will see an exemption claimed as a category rather than a citation, which is not a valid claim in most states but works fine on a requester who does not know that. You will see silence, which is the most common one of all.

Each of those has a written answer, and the answer is what you are actually buying. A fee estimate gets a request for the itemization the statute usually requires. An unnamed exemption gets a letter asking which one, applied to which record, under which subsection. Silence gets a dated follow-up that quietly builds the record you would need if this ever went further than a letter.

None of that is aggressive. It is just the same request, restated, with the clock visible.

What this campaign will not do

I am not a lawyer, and this is not a lawsuit. If the agency's final answer is no and you want to challenge it in court, that is the point where you need counsel licensed in your state, and I will hand your file over in a shape that makes their first hour cheaper.

I also cannot promise you a finding. Some agencies run a real process and can show their work, and when that happens the honest outcome of the campaign is a page saying so. That is a real result and worth publishing, but it is not the one anybody buys hoping for. If your project only works if the records are damning, do not hire me. Nobody can sell you that.

And no request in this campaign asks for anyone's plate number, vehicle photograph, owner record, or investigative target. We say so inside the request itself, in writing, before the agency gets the chance to raise it.

How do we start?

Tell me the agency and what you are trying to find out. That is enough for a first conversation, and I will tell you honestly whether a campaign is the right tool or whether you should take the free template and file it yourself. Sometimes it is the second one.

• The Must Exist method and free request templates →
• Must Exist Autopsy — a live class in records practice, not law →
• Read the case files on Substack →

Stop tweeting at the surveillance state. Start filing against it.

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I am not a lawyer, and nothing on this page is legal advice. What you will find here is process guidance and template language. Records law varies a great deal from one state to the next and from one set of facts to the next. If your situation turns on your own circumstances, talk to a lawyer licensed in your state.