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Emergency Executive Order: Extension of Emergency Measures for NYC Department of Correction Facilities

EEO
Office of the Mayor of the City of New York • Jun 12, 2025

EEO 816 extends the emergency measures previously enacted for the Department of Correction (DOC) facilities. The order cites ongoing challenges at Rikers Island, including staff attrition and its impact on safety, security, and access to basic services for those in custody.

NY City Council Transcript – 11 Jun 2025

Transcript
New York City Council • Jun 11, 2025

The Council voted on a range of legislative items, including land use modifications, affordable housing projects, tax exemptions, and public health measures such as opioid overdose prevention in city jails and the installation of public drinking fountains. Members discussed and voted on resolutions addressing federal policy impacts, pension reforms for families of fallen officers, and the recognition of significant cultural and historical events. The meeting included debate over a proposal related to casino development and the transfer of public land, with several members expressing opposition or concerns.

NYC Comptroller Calls for Expanded Immigration Legal Services

Report
New York City Comptroller • Jun 10, 2025

The report urges expanding access to immigration legal services for non‑citizen New Yorkers amid shifting federal policies. It recommends boosting City funding for key programmes like ActionNYC, the Immigration Opportunity Initiative, and the New York Immigrant Family Unity Project, as well as restoring cut services such as ICARE support for unaccompanied children and the Rapid Response Legal Collaborative. It also calls for expanding the Friend of the Court Programme to protect immigrants in court.

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Latest updates

epistimi sources milestone

July 7, 2026

epistimi surpasses 330 sources scraped

We've crossed a new milestone: 330 government sources now scraped and searchable on epistimi. Our focus remains on the local layer of government, city councils, counties, and infrastructure authorities, that generalist search tools and even most public-records platforms cover poorly, if at all. These bodies produce some of the most consequential documents for local reporting, and they're exactly where existing tools fall short. Growing this coverage is central to how we're building epistimi.

International Journalism Festival

April 20, 2026

epistimi at the International Journalism Festival in Perugia

We had a great time at this year's International Journalism Festival in Perugia, connecting with journalists, researchers, and media thinkers from around the world. It was a valuable chance to share what we're building and hear directly from the people who work with primary sources every day. We also came away with a list of interesting new tools for investigative journalism that caught our attention, which we wrote about here.

Frequently asked questions

epistimi is an intelligence platform built to support how journalists and researchers work with public records. Our goal is to make discovery faster, deeper, and more powerful by combining a comprehensive database of government‑issued documents with tools designed to surface insights.

Document search is just the foundation. We plan to introduce a growing set of features and capabilities that, over time, will make epistimi an indispensable tool for local and public‑policy journalism.

epistimi is built for journalists who need quick, reliable access to official government sources. It's also well suited for researchers and public policy professionals who work with public records and want a faster, more focused way to find and verify primary documents.

The search covers official government documents and publications. This includes municipal records, county records, and materials published by local government bodies such as city councils, mayor's offices, comptrollers, agencies, and public authorities.

epistimi covers over 200 government bodies across more than 30 U.S. states, including city councils, county boards, and municipal agencies. You can browse the full list on our Sources page.

Coverage is actively expanding, and additional government bodies can be suggested via the Sources Request Form.

Google is designed to search the entire web. This platform is purpose built to search only official government documents and publications.

Instead of sending you through outdated pages, secondary sources, or blogs, we focus exclusively on authoritative sources from government bodies and make them searchable in one place. Every result leads you directly to an official, government‑issued document.

Compared to navigating individual government websites, this saves time by eliminating fragmentation, inconsistent layouts, and manual searching across dozens of portals. Many public documents are published as low‑quality scans that are difficult to search, so we apply OCR to make their contents discoverable.

Yes — for now. epistimi is free while we build and expand the platform. As coverage and capabilities grow, we plan to introduce paid plans to support long term development, while keeping the tool affordable and accessible for journalists, including freelancers.

You can ask the smart assistant questions about a document you're viewing. It responds based on the information available in the document and always points you to the specific section where the information appears, so you can verify the source yourself.

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