It's happening again. The University of Virginia is ignoring follow-up inquiries on multiple Freedom of Information Act requests that I have submitted going back to February of 2020. The hill that the University of Virginia wants to die on is the "You aren't a resident" hill. Meanwhile, the they are completely ignoring my First Amendment guaranteed right of Freedom of the Press. Despite multiple follow-up emails, UVA doesn't seem interested in following the Virginia FOIA law. I hope they have a change of heart because there are other legal remedies available. Denial of my FOIA requests is in my opinion a creative way to stop the public from getting information about the government they are paying for and which belongs to them. Public servants believe that they can use law to actually stop the public from learning what exactly they are doing with the power they have been given by us. Foolish.
On April 25, 2019, I submitted a Freedom of Information Act request for public information to the Charlottesville Police Department. The request was submitted through Muckrock, a website designed to promote greater government transparency and make filing a FOIA request easier for the public. I purchased a Muckrock Professional account for $40, which gives me up to 20 FOIA requests through the site every month and includes a feature which detects if you are filing from out-of-state and then submits the requests through a group of volunteer proxy filers. A proxy filer is someone who takes the place of the actual filer, and in this case, the proxy filer appears to be a Virginia resident who has successfully submitted previous FOIA requests to the Charlottesville Police Department with no issues. Muckrock also includes a feature where you are able to view the actual email data. The email data for this particular requests ap...
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