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How to Contact the Correct Agencies and Request the Information

Almost everywhere, complaints about barking dogs are handled by either animal control, the police department, or one of the local humane societies, which often provide animal-related services to municipalities on a contract basis.

Obtaining barking-related information from your local humane society or animal control department is a very straightforward process. You just need to contact that agency and ask to speak with their records manager or whoever is in charge of retrieving information for people who request it under the Freedom of Information Act.

Tell the records person that you would like to make a public records request pursuant to the Freedom of Information Act. Specifically, you would like to know how many barking complaints have been filed, and also, be sure to ask for the summaries of those reports.

The records clerk can give you an up front estimate of what it will cost you to have the search done, before you make a commitment to move forward. In our experience, the estimate given by the records clerk has been right on the money. Also we have found limited records searches to be affordable, in the range well under a hundred dollars.

However, the further back in time the search goes, the more expensive it will be. Therefore, if you find the clerk's initial estimate to be too dear for your liking, you can bring the price down by limiting your search so that it spans only the more recent past.

You can also keep your cost down by restricting your search to a smaller geographic area. For example, it is likely to cost you less to do a search for your city than it would be for you to pull the barking records for the entire county.

We recommend that you inquire as to the status of your search if you have not heard back in about a week, although you may receive notification that your search has been completed in as little as two or three working days.

If barking enforcement is handled in your town by the police, then, obviously, there will be no need for you to search the records of animal control. However, if such things are handled by animal control or the humane society, then, to get a really complete picture of barking enforcement in your area, you will need to search both that data base as well as the police records.

That is because, even though strictly speaking the police may not handle barking enforcement where you live, they do still respond to secondary problems that arise as a result of barking dogs. Therefore, the police files may contain a great deal of barking-related information, even though the cops don't actually handle barking dog complaints per se.

Up to a point, conducting a search of the police data base is exactly the same as searching the animal control or humane society records. (See above.) It can be a little trickier and a bit more expensive, however, because you need to search more categories than just that one classification: Complaint of a barking dog.

Indeed, unless your local police department is tasked with the job of barking dog enforcement, the department may have no such classification as a barking dog complaint because, strictly speaking, they don't handle barking dog complaints. Although, they most certainly do respond to calls about problems that developed because somebody allowed their dog to bark uncorrected.

As a result, barking dog-related complaints that were made to the police may be filed away under any of the following four categories, among others:
1) Barking complaints
2) General animal complaints
3) Neighborhood disputes
4) Noise disturbances

Of course, the more categories you encompass in your search the more it will cost you. Therefore, we suggest that you begin your effort to obtain the police records, including the summaries of the complaints, by asking the police records manager to search all of the categories listed above, but only going back a month or two for starters.

That will allow you to determine whether your local police officers are commonly filing barking complaints under any or all of the categories listed above. Then, when you conduct your next search, going further back in time, you can eliminate the categories that seem the least likely to be productive.

Also, remember that the records manager can give you an estimate for the cost of the search before he does the work.

Go forward to read about How to sort through the information and make sense of it all

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