FOIA & Public Records Research

A public-records request — a FOIA request, in the usual shorthand — is a simple idea that goes wrong in a hundred small ways. You ask an agency for a document, and then the request turns out to be too vague to fill, or it lands in a department that doesn't hold the file, or nobody follows up and it quietly dies on someone's desk. This service is about the process itself rather than about researching a person: writing a request that can actually be answered, sending it to the right office, staying on it, and then making sense of what comes back.

I'm Eugene Butler, a licensed Michigan private investigator based in Flint, and this is the part of the job that runs on paper. Most of it starts with narrowing the question. Agencies respond to specificity, so a date range, an incident number, a department, or the name of a record series gets further than a broad ask that is easy to refuse or bury.

I draft the request in the agency's own vocabulary, file it with the right records coordinator, and then keep after it, logging when it went out, when the response window set by law comes due, when an extension gets invoked, and what any fee estimate looks like before it turns into a surprise. Agencies do extend, some are slow, and following up on schedule is often the difference between a file that arrives and one that doesn't. A lot of what people need doesn't live in a database at all.

Court files, older property records, county clerk records, and the exhibits that only exist in a physical case jacket require someone to go to the courthouse counter or the county office and pull them. That legwork is a real part of this service, and it's what the online record-search sites skip, which is why their results so often stop at a docket summary. The last piece is reading the stack.

Produced records arrive in whatever order the agency printed them, full of internal codes, cross-references, and blacked-out lines, and you shouldn't have to reverse-engineer a filing system to answer your own question. I review what came back against what you actually asked, summarize what the documents say and what they don't, note the gaps that suggest another request is worth making, and organize the paper so it can be used. Attorneys hire me for agency records a case turns on.

Individuals come for incident and accident documentation. Reporters and researchers need the file behind a story, and property and business matters come with their own paper trail. I'll be straight about the ceiling, though: some records are exempt, some were never public to begin with, and no honest investigator can tell you in advance what an agency will hand over. If you need records from a Michigan agency or a courthouse file, call or text me directly at 810-513-0662.