Connecticut’s Department of Emergency Services and Public Protection (DESPP) is not an agency you want to deal with if you need information in a hurry.
DESPP, along with the Department of Correction, routinely tops my list of agencies who take the longest to respond to Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests. This year alone, myself and several other Inside Investigator reporters have filed more than a dozen requests with the agency. We have not received movement, and certainly not any responsive documents, on a single one. That includes a request I marked as high priority because the documents I requested were implicated in a motion to dismiss a Freedom of Information Commission (FOIC) complaint I’m currently fighting.
That also includes a request I submitted in January seeking a log of requests the agency received and acted on in 2025–data that will help shed light on exactly how bad the FOIA backlog at DESPP is. And that’s not to say anything of older outstanding requests–I also have one that dates back to 2024 and 9 that date back to 2025.
There are a couple of reasons DESPP’s routine failure to promptly handle requests, as FOIA requires, is concerning.
The first, of course, is that by making requesters wait months, if not years on end, for responsive documents, they are constructively denying access to public records. It’s disturbing when any agency official does that. Public records are, after all, the property of the public. When government officials ignore FOIA, they’re not only flouting the law, they’re making government oversight impossible.
But it’s particularly disturbing when an agency like DESPP, which has the legal authority to use deadly force, effectively seals itself off from any scrutiny of its actions.
And that brings us squarely to the second reason why, from a journalistic perspective, DESPP’s failure to promptly respond to requests are so concerning.
Timeliness is an important element of news reporting. When misconduct happens at agencies, there needs to be accountability. And that happens most effectively when the public and the media are aware of allegations of wrongdoing right away and can put pressure on agencies to communicate what’s going on and push for those responsible to be held accountable.
DESPP already has a bottleneck in its public communications. As of September 2025, a Connecticut State Police (CSP) policy routes all requests for comments through a single office and bans C officers from talking to the media outside the chain of command.
News of that policy, which CSP insisted was already routine and was just formalized last September, did not become public for months, demonstrating the agency’s lack of transparency (a FOIA request to learn more about how this policy operates in practice is among those I currently have outstanding).
Practically, though, this gives DESPP an incredible amount of power to shape their own narrative. Requests for comments, if they’re returned at all, are often couched in official language that doesn’t necessarily answer questions or provide any clarity.
FOIA is the tool at the disposal of the media and the public when agencies don’t want to answer questions about matters of public concern. But if agencies can sit on requests for records for months or years — until the eye of public scrutiny has moved on to another issue — then the law is not serving its purpose.
As I have argued countless times before, the lack of a strict deadline by which agencies must respond to FOIA requests severely limits the law’s effectiveness. Yes, FOIA requires agencies to respond to requests “promptly,” but holding agencies to that requires filing a complaint with the FOIC, which does have a specific definition of promptness.
Bringing a complaint before the FOIC is not a quick process. It can take up to a year to get a ruling, effectively allowing an agency to further delay handing over documents. And agencies can appeal a ruling or fail to comply with the FOIC’s orders, again extending the period of time before records are turned over.
And when you’re a journalist with a lead on agency misconduct, waiting that long for records that would corroborate a story or help protect a source is incredibly frustrating. Again, you’re risking not receiving records until well past the moment a story is of public relevance.
For a small newsroom like Inside Investigator, filing an FOIC complaint every time an agency like DESPP ignores a request for months on end is also a burden. Across our reporters, we could file over a dozen complaints tomorrow, which would take a significant amount of our time and attention away from our news gathering abilities and also require a fairly sizeable investment of public resources.
It’s another point where delaying tactics, made possible in part by the lack of timeline to respond to requests in FOIA, are in the agency’s favor: if they simply sit on enough requests, it’s more difficult for the public or the media, who usually don’t have anything approaching the resources of the attorney general’s offices to represent them before the FOIC, to fight every request that is constructively denied by months or years of inaction.
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