RETRIEVING DOCUMENT
On August 14th, the city clerk's office released a partial response to the public records request I filed on June 27th for the scoring rubric the emergency placement committee used to approve nine vouchers out of forty-three eligible households on July 16th.
Forty-eight days. That is how long the request took.
The rubric has five weighted categories: household size, documented income loss, length of displacement, availability of alternative housing, and institutional cooperation.
The numeric weights are redacted. The clerk's cover letter cites "deliberative process privilege." The category names are not redacted, which means someone decided the names were safe to release and the numbers were not. I have asked twice what "institutional cooperation" measures as an input. Both times I was told the definition is "internal to the scoring process."
Mrs. Adaeze Mbeki was not among the nine. She has spoken to me, on the record, by name, in six dispatches since June 13th, about a deployment the city has not confirmed happened the way she says it happened. I am not telling you that is why she scored the way she scored. I do not have the numbers. I am telling you the category exists, that it has a name I cannot define, and that the two facts sit next to each other whether or not they are related.
She is still in Roseland. Fifth floor. The elevator that was broken in July is broken in August. Her daughter has stopped asking about the fireworks. She has started asking why they moved.
Three other things, briefly, because I count them and because someone should.
Source D — the former SIGINT contractor who told me in July that pre-positioning for signal collection requires advance knowledge or continuous surveillance, and who would not confirm or deny that the eleven-minute arrival at Wacker and Michigan fit that pattern — has not returned a call in fifty-four days.
The man who claimed to represent the Chicago Housing Transition Office, an office that does not exist, has been dark for sixty-five days. His handwritten number still connects to nothing.
Darius's audio drive has moved. Not far. I found someone — I am not naming them yet, and I do not know yet whether I trust them enough to — who has agreed to look at the compressed signal data on the drive, the part neither of us could open in June. They have not opened it. They asked for two weeks. That was nine days ago.
I do not have a headline today. I have a rubric with a category nobody will define, a mother whose case was deferred to a review cycle that still has no announced date, and two sources — one human, one electronic — that have both gone quiet at roughly the same rate the summer has.
Fifty-four days. Sixty-five days. Zero pages, still, from the FOIA request. Nine votes out of forty-three, with a fifth category no one will explain.
I keep counting because the county stopped.