Imagine waiting in line for public records at the Office of the City Clerk, only to find most of the requests ahead of you come from out-of-state data scrapers or suspected artificial intelligence bots overseas.
Inside the city clerk’s office, that’s the reality. Record requests keep climbing, driven by out-of-state and overseas requests that strain staff and slow access for residents.
City Clerk Ethan Watson sat down with City Desk to discuss the surge, saying the requests appear to be AI-generated and tied to YouTube content creation.
“Picture yourself getting in line,” Watson said. “Now, every other person in that line is probably from out of state — they’re from Arkansas, they’re from Florida, they’re from Nevada and they’re from Pakistan.”
Albuquerque Police Department-related requests jumped 69% in a single year, and Bahawalpur, Pakistan — which had zero requests last year — is now the second-busiest requester city behind Albuquerque, with 272 requests in just three months.
Watson told the City Council his office received 20,000 requests last calendar year and expects the same this fiscal year.
Non-U.S. requesters make up 10% of requests but consume 21% of staff time, and one Arkansas man alone filed 294 requests — consuming 454 hours of staff time in a single quarter.
The bottleneck is not just basic paperwork — it’s police lapel camera video. Watson said every minute of footage takes two to three minutes to process and city staff is working through thousands of requests of raw, unedited video from out-of-state content creators, leaving Burqueños waiting longer.
Albuquerque spends nearly $2 million a year on its public records division and employs 30 full-time staff but Watson said the investment is not solving the problem.
He said throwing money at the problem is backfiring; faster systems seem to draw more automated requests. For the upcoming fiscal year, the office is adding temporary staff while the debate over long-term solutions plays out.
“I don’t know that resources are the answer. There has to be some change to the system,” Watson said. “The more people we add, the more requests we get.”
Written in 1993, the New Mexico Inspection of Public Records Act (IPRA), and the clerk’s quarterly report calls it a “broken law” that has not kept pace with the digital era. But Christine Barber, executive director of the New Mexico Foundation for Open Government, said restricting who can file is not the solution.
“Once we start putting any kind of limitations on that, we are going on a very, very slippery slope towards only certain people can ask for certain records,” Barber said.
The legislature passed House Joint Memorial 2, directing the Attorney General to convene a task force of records custodians, journalists and civil rights advocates, which includes Barber and Watson, to study reform, with recommendations due in October.
“I don’t know what the answer is,” Watson said. “I think it’s important to really debate these issues so that we have the request system and the access system that people want.”
