The Civic Police Data Project (CPDP.co) is a tool for holding police accountable to the public they serve.
Civic Police Data Project (CPDP) takes records of police interactions with the public – records that would otherwise be buried in internal databases – and opens them up to make the data useful to the public, creating a permanent record for every CPD police officer.
Building on this work, in September of 2024, we launched the National Police Index - a new data tool for residents of 17 states to access the employment history for all law enforcement officers in the state.
The database, the first and largest of its kind in the country, holds more than a quarter million allegations of misconduct by Chicago Police from 1988-2023. Of the 259,865 allegations made against Chicago Police, only 8% were disciplined.
Now included on the site are more than 1,500 settlements and successful lawsuits filed against the Chicago Police, dating from 2011 through 2019. Shared through a partnership with The Chicago Reporter, which originally published settlement data on their “Settling for Misconduct” project, reporters at The Chicago Reporter and the Invisible Institute cleaned the updated data together. Altogether, these cases total nearly $500 million in police settlements.
Designed to serve as a national model of transparency and accountability in law enforcement, the Civic Police Data Project is the product of a decades-long collaboration with the University of Chicago Law School’s Mandel Legal Aid Clinic. The Invisible Institute released the first iteration of the site in 2015, as a result of successful litigation in Kalven v. City of Chicago (2014), which established that police misconduct records are public in Illinois. The last major data update to the site was in 2018, and its revamped desktop and mobile officer lookup tool proved especially useful during protests in the summer of 2020, as activists on the ground searched officers’ names.
Initial findings, based on data added from 2018 - 2023, include:
More than 12,000 new allegations have been published to the site. Additionally, complete underlying documents containing complaint narratives have been added to the site for complaints made between 2011 - 2015.
Since 2018, only 5% of CPD officers have six or more complaints. These officers are responsible for more than 30% of all CPD complaints. This includes Officer Enrique Delgado Fernandez who, at 43 complaints filed since 2018, leads in misconduct allegations. In 2023, footage was published by activist Will Calloway of Delgado Fernandez beating a detainee inside a police station.
Chicago Police filed more than 28,000 use of force reports between 2017 and mid-2023. CPD’s own data shows that while reports fell sharply between 2020 and 2022, in 2023 they rose to close to 5,000 – nearly level with the number of use of force reports officers were filing before the consent decree.
Officers with seven or more use of force reports make up just 5% of CPD officers but account for more than 36% of all Tactical Response Reports (TRRs) since 2018. Use of force is self-reported by Chicago Police and there are indications that officers do not file reports with the same consistency. For example, our data contains more than 300 officers who, since 2018, have at least one more complaint for excessive use of force than they have reported using force.
Since 2018, collaborators of the Invisible Institute have been instrumental to creating the update to the officer lookup tool: Rajiv Sinclair and Sukari Stone of Public Data Works, developers at East Agile, and the late designer Alex Laskaris were critical to the design and foundation of the site; Sinclair, Stone, Philipp Birklbauer and Matt Chapman labored over a pipeline to intake and make accessible hundreds of thousands of underlying investigative documents made public through Green v. CPD; former staff at The Chicago Reporter built and updated “Settling for Misconduct” and forged this partnership; Hector Iturre of 79.X solutions implemented the latest update; and Ashwin Sharma created a data update pipeline that will be essential to the future of the site.
We’ve built CPDP with a focus on making data both accessible and useful by collaborating closely with the people who can best make use of it. If you’ve used CPDP and you’re open to talking with us about your experience, please join our feedback community or click on the live chat bubble in the bottom-right corner to reach out at any time. CPDP has been cited in a variety of academic research; read a collection of thoughtful uses of the data here.
The codebase and the growing collection of underlying datasets plus data processing scripts and the original FOIA responses are available publicly here: