BarkingDogs.net

About the Freedom of Information Act

The Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) was passed into law to allow concerned citizens to obtain public information by requesting it from government. Around the world, many governmental entities, be they city, state, province, nation, or whatever, has some version of the freedom of information act, which should allow you to learn how many barking dog complaints have been filed with your local authorities, and how many citations have been written.

Contrasting the number of citations written by your local authorities with the number of complaints registered, will, to some extent, allow you to assess the performance of your local authorities when it comes to barking dog enforcement.

To be sure, the number of complaints filed will be far lower in an area where enforcement is poor than they would be in the same area if word got around that a complaint to the authorities would result in a quick resolution of the problem. Therefore, the number of complaints is likely to fall far short as an indicator of the actual number of people who are forced to live with barking dog nightmares. Nonetheless, the ratio of complaint to citation will provide you with at least some measure of how seriously your local authorities take chronic barking, and the extent to which they are attempting to address the problem within the context of under-funded institutions and laws that were designed to be ineffective.

What your search is Likely to Reveal

To the best of our knowledge, Barbara Shelby, who is a Barking Dogs staffer and the facilitator of Barking Dogs Yahoo, was the first to tap into a government data base on barking dogs enforcement using the freedom of information act. Using FOIA, Barbara discovered that, where she lives in St. Petersburg, Florida, although one-hundred-and-seventy-one barking complaints were filed with the department of animal control, that agency wrote not one citation. No one was fined. No one was held accountable. And when it came to chronic barking, no attempt was made to protect the public health. And you can bet dollars to dimes that it is about the same where you live.

Obtaining the barking dog data for your area will allow you to prove that which is almost certainly true: Your local barking laws are fraudulent because, for all practical purposes, chronic barking has been legalized where you live.

With the data on barking enforcement in hand, you will be in a position to address the performance of the authorities when you speak to them at the next council meeting. And then, when you write a letter to the editor of your local newspaper and contribute your two cents worth to the Barking Dogs Forum, people will have to acknowledge that you know what you are talking about.

Go forward to read about How to contact the correct agencies and get the information you need

This page is a component of the Freedom of Information subsection, which is part
of the Strategies and Interventions portion of the Activist section of barkingdogs.net