Across 111 fee petitions, the Massachusetts State Police has been authorized to charge specific named requesters $2.73 million. The Supervisor of Records said yes 80.6% of the time.

Massachusetts charged a MuckRock journalist $823,425 to ask the State Police how often they fly drones. The Supervisor of Records said that was fine — because the State Police gave the request a filing date five days after it was actually sent.

Beryl Lipton filed a public-records request through MuckRock seeking records of every drone flight the Massachusetts State Police had conducted. The Department's quote was computed at three minutes per email across an asserted 658,000 emails — at $25 per hour, the lowest-paid-skilled-employee rate. The petition was timely under the State Police's reported receipt date and would have been waived under the requester's stated send date. The Supervisor of Records did not address the timing question in the order.

Send date verified via MuckRock API. Request submitted 2020-08-05 at 23:51 ET. SOR order SPR20/1448 recites receipt as 2020-08-10 — five calendar days later.

The State Police asked a Gannett reporter for $1,877,775 to produce demographic data from traffic stops. The Supervisor of Records called it a violation of the law's bar on fees "designed to limit, deter or prevent access."

Tracy Hinkle, reporting for Gannett New England, requested demographic data from MSP motor-vehicle stops between January 1, 2014 and June 26, 2020 — racial-profiling data. The quote was the largest single fee in the public-records corpus. The Supervisor of Records denied prong-2 of the petition, holding that the fee was not reasonable and was effectively designed to deter access. The Department was sent back to write a revised estimate; the underlying records were not ordered produced. This is the foil to the drone case: same agency, same year, same template, opposite outcome.

Massachusetts charged MuckRock $281,150 to search State Police emails for the words "protest," "Black Lives Matter," or "antifa" during the summer of 2020. The Supervisor of Records approved the charge.

Emma Best, filing through MuckRock, requested State Police emails to and from police unions, the National Guard, and federal officials from May 1, 2020 onward — plus all emails containing the protest-related keywords. The Department's quote relied on the same three-minutes-per-email math used in the drone case, applied to an asserted 225,000 responsive items. The Supervisor granted prong-2 without requiring itemized justification of the three-minute-per-email assumption. The records sought spoke directly to how MSP coordinated with federal and state partners during the 2020 racial-justice protests.

A year before the State Police charged Beryl Lipton $823,425 to ask about drones, they charged her $77,461 to ask about face recognition. The Supervisor of Records approved that one too.

This is the petition the drone quote was modeled on. Lipton sought eight categories of records on MSP's solicitation, acquisition, and use of facial-recognition technology. The Department applied the same three-minutes-per-email × email-volume math the next year would scale to nearly $1 million on drone records. The Supervisor granted prong-2 on identical reasoning. The 2019 grant established the template; the 2020 grant cemented it.

Request filed directly with MSP, not via MuckRock. The original request letter is obtainable from MSP under the Public Records Law.

The Massachusetts ACLU asked the State Police which crimes had been investigated using facial recognition; the State Police quoted $95,250. This time the Supervisor of Records said no.

Emiliano Falcon of the ACLU of Massachusetts requested the names and docket numbers of cases in which MSP had used facial-recognition technology, along with internal emails about facial-recognition vendors and pending legislation. The Department quoted $95,250. The Supervisor of Records denied prong-2 on public-interest grounds, explicitly stating that facial recognition is "a particularly dangerous surveillance technology" and that the records would "shed light on MSP's ongoing activities." This is the inverse story: the same agency that won on Lipton's drone records lost on the ACLU's facial-recognition records.

Massachusetts charged the ACLU $23,769 to see emails about a single State Police surveillance vendor. The Supervisor of Records said the agency had met its burden.

Kade Crockford, the ACLU of Massachusetts's longtime surveillance-technology lead, requested records about MSP's relationship with LAN-TEL Communications — a vendor of police surveillance equipment — going back to 2015. The Department's quote was modest by comparison to the other spotlight cases on this page, but the math was identical: three minutes per email, applied across an asserted email volume. The Supervisor granted prong-2.

Massachusetts charged a man $1,336,250 to see his own State Police Crime Lab file. The Supervisor of Records approved the charge.

Faulk — appearing pro se, without counsel — requested "any and all gun testing" for 2007 and "any and all documents in your state police crime lab about me." The Department quoted $1.34 million across 718 firearms files and asserted review-and-redaction time. The Supervisor of Records granted prong-2 on the Department's assertion that the records required individualized exemption review. The reasonableness of the underlying hourly estimate was not interrogated. The petition succeeded against an unrepresented requester.