About Open Public Records

What we do

Open Public Records grades every state, every county, and every city police department in the United States on whether they actually deliver the public records the law says belong to the public.

We are not a directory. We are not a data broker. We are not a background-check service. We do not sell records, we do not sell access, and we do not take advertising from companies that do.

Who we are

The site is run by Search Systems, an independent public-records research company founded in 1997. We have been doing this work for almost thirty years.

Why we built this

We built Open Public Records because somebody had to. There are thousands of "find public records" websites on the internet. Almost all of them are directories. They list a phone number, link to an official portal, and walk away.

They do not tell you the portal has been down for two years. They do not tell you the agency charges fifty dollars for a record the law calls free. They do not tell you the county clerk office stopped answering its phone in 2019. Most of them are AI content farms running the same template over forty thousand pages.

We are not that, and we will not become that.

How we work

• Every public-record portal is physically tested — we visit the URL, time the response, and verify it returns what it claims.
• Every agency contact phone is called and logged.
• Every state, county, and city gets a letter grade based on real delivery, not marketing claims.
• We integrate federal data sources: DOJ, FBI, EPA, IRS, CFPB, HHS-OIG, FDIC, NPPES, FCC, OFAC, and 23 local arrest feeds.
• News is aggregated from 69 RSS feeds across U.S. Attorney offices, FBI field offices, SEC, FTC, OCC, and IRS-CI.

Contact

Press inquiries, data corrections, removal requests, or general questions: contact us.

For FCRA-related questions, see our FCRA Notice. For privacy and data-removal requests, see our Privacy Policy.