Since 2016, public-interest news source The Chicago Reporter has maintained a website revealing police misconduct in shocking detail. The interactive database, Settling for Misconduct, tracks the millions of dollars in city spending on settlements for violations such as illegal searches, excessive force, bribery, forced confession or other breaches of proper police conduct. The website lets visitors see the details of specific cases, including the names of officers involved, and the amount of money paid out.
Perhaps no surprise, this invaluable resource to community organizers won The Chicago Reporter no friends with the Chicago Police Department (CPD), who in 2018, first stalled, then withheld information in response to a follow-up Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request, claiming it didn’t have the resources to gather the (previously provided) information.
After nearly year-long battle to get the information, the Illinois Attorney General’s Office handed the Chicago Reader a victory this April, advising the Chicago Police Department to hand over the records. The legal question at issue here sets (or reinforces) an important precedent in how police departments and other public agencies are to respond to specific data requests.
Christopher Boggs, attorney with the Illinois Attorney General’s Public Access Bureau, wrote in a legal opinion that “although a public body is not required to create new records in order to comply with FOIA, a public body may need to create and apply a new query in order to provide a proper response to a FOIA request seeking data.”
In other words, a FOIA request can’t command an agency to create new records, but it can force them to query their database to comply with the request for information, including for specific fields – in this case, ones that provide the transparency of names and badge numbers that link incidents of police misconduct to individual officers. Particularly useful to those seeking police accountability, and particularly sensitive to the police department.
More than a year after the Chicago Reader’s May 2018 FOIA request and months after the Attorney General’s response, the Chicago Police Department provided the records as requested, turning over “a spreadsheet of 33,280 current and former Chicago police officers dating back to the mid-1940s, including names, badge numbers, dates of service, last rank and assignment and other data points” according to the Reporter’s Matt Kiefer.
The Chicago Reader will be using the data not only to update the Settling for Misconduct database, but to fuel other criminal justice reporting projects in a new joint initiative between news organizations, academics, and researchers called the Chicago Data Collaborative.
