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How to Sort Through the Information and Make Sense of It All

Sorting Through the Information

When the first phase of your freedom of information search is complete and the information is in hand, you will have before you the summaries of every complaint filed with each of the agencies, in each of the categories for which you requested information.

Contained within the summaries, you can expect to find the following information:

1. The date and time when the complaint came in

2. What the complainant said the problem was

3. The date and time when the officer responded

4. The name of the police officer or animal control officer who came out in response to the call

5. Usually they will give the address of the house where the barking dog is located

6. What action the officer took in the way of resolving the complaint

7. Sometimes they will summarize the dog owner's response to the officer

Making Sense of It All

If you, yourself, personally have ever called the authorities to complain of a neighbor's barking dog, you might want to start your perusal of the summaries by searching through to find the summary of the complaint that you filed. That will accomplish a couple things. First, if the summary of your complaint is not there, then you will know right off the bat that you have not been provided with a full set of records. Also, by checking to see how your complaint was classified and processed, you may gain valuable insight into how all barking complaints are categorized and processed through the system.

After reading through the official summary of your own complaint, just to get oriented to the task at hand, you should probably take a little time to scan a number of the summaries of complaints filed by others, and read through a few of them carefully.

As you look over the summaries, you will notice that sometimes a barking complaint will be filed in some multi-item category like "barking/nuisance/odor complaint." Therefore, in order to know if the document you have in your hand is a complaint about a barking dog, you will need to read the summary, which is why those documents are essential to your freedom of information search.

Beyond a doubt, if barking enforcement is poor or nonexistent where you live, your local governmental agencies will receive far fewer complaints about barking dogs than they would if all the locals knew that a chronic barking problem could be quickly corrected with a call to the authorities. After all, you are unlikely to call the cops to report a barking problem when everybody knows that all that is going to get you is the runaround.

Therefore, because poor enforcement performance by the authorities suppresses the inclination of the populous to report barking problems, you can be certain that the number of barking complaints received by the authorities is by no means an accurate measure of the actual number of citizens who have been exposed to noise trauma by way of chronic barking.

However, even though the number of barking complaints is a pale indicator of the true number of people stricken by abusively loud neighbors, it does, nonetheless, offer a window into the performance of your local officials. After all, if the situation in your town is characterized by a large number of people being victimized, in combination with fraudulent barking laws, written so as to be unenforceable, it is hard to escape the conclusion that your local authorities are more focused on covering for the perpetrators in order to please the dog industry than they are in bringing relief to their victimized citizens who, in many cases, are suffering severe health problems due to relentless noise.

Therefore, when you tally up the results of your search, the first thing you will want to do is to contrast the number of citations written by your local authorities with the number of complaints filed. If you find a relatively large number of complaints and a small or nonexistent number of citations, you can take that as proof positive of governmental negligence and/or corruption when it comes to this critically important public health issue.

If you find that there are repeated complaints about barking dogs located at the same address, or you find that there have been repeated complaints made over time lodged from one particular address, those also are sure signs that your local politicians are lying down on the job, and your local system of barking control and dog management simply is not working. After all, if the system worked, all barking disruptions would be quickly brought to a lasting end, and the sort of intractable problems indicated by a number of same address complaints that continue to be lodged over time would not exist.

The number of barking-related calls coming in to the police department, and the number of times that officers go out in response, along with the number of officers sent to answer each call, are all extremely revealing statistics in this time of monetary shortfalls and budgetary crises.

The fact is that the laws, the policies and the priorities of our lobbyist-directed animal control system so hamstring the police that in most places, under the current system, there is nothing the cops can do to protect a bark abuse victim. And because the victims are left on their own to try to resolve it themselves, confrontation frequently ensues, which results in tit-for-tat retaliation as secondary problems spiral out of control, which then requires an additional expenditure of police resources.

Responding to the fallout from long-festering chronic barking situations costs the police department and, therefore, the taxpayers, a great deal of money, which is yet again one of the many hidden costs of allowing this easily preventable public health crisis to fester.

The fact that the authorities allow the barking epidemic to continue and, thereby, allow police resources to be squandered on what could be and should be a non-existent problem, tells you a great deal about the fitness of your local politicians to continue on in public office.

What to Do Next

Now that you have gathered your first round of data, analyzed its content and reflected on its meaning, the question arises as to what you might want to do next.

In many jurisdictions, people are not ticketed and, thereby, fined for keeping barking dogs. Rather, in that rare instance in which any action is taken, the official policy is to require the offending party to appear before a judge where he may or not be fined. If that is true where you live, then, you may want to go back and do a follow-up search to learn how many people were ultimately taken to court for keeping barking dogs and what penalty, if any, was imposed on them.

If your initial Freedom of Information request consisted of the search of a number of categories, but going back only a short distance in time, you may want to eliminate the categories that were unproductive in terms of the number of tickets written and do a second search of the other, more productive categories, only this time, going back a good deal further in time. Also, by that point you very likely will have learned of other ways that barking complaints are filed, or made discoveries about other avenues of investigation that you would like to pursue.

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