Mission
CJP's core mission is to increase public access to justice related information, based on the guiding principle that access to accurate information is the foundation of any meaningful reform to the criminal justice system. We build this approach based on the premise that law enforcement agencies are accountable to the communities they serve - and that accountability and community collaboration in the shared mission to create and preserve safe and secure neighborhoods is thwarted when public access to vital information about patterns and practices is restricted.
Today, community residents and grassroots groups must jump through costly and time-consuming bureaucratic and procedural hurdles to access even the most basic information about policing and criminal justice practices in their communities. While academicians, legal professionals, policy makers and the press must also overcome these obstacles to open information, they are a particular hardship in underserved communities, where residents often can cite anecdotal incidents that suggest problems but cannot access the larger historical data and background information to make a clear statistical or factual case for shifts in police practices and criminal justice policy. As a result of poor access to data, community members face a range of issues from inadequate police coverage and crime prevention strategies to patterns and practices of abuse by particular police units or officers.
The consequences are significant. Poor public access to data from local policing and public criminal justice agencies has made it extremely difficult to identify and take steps to remediate the behavior of problem officers or clearly document and revise practices that generate problematic or undesirable outcomes. In addition, every instance of police abuse undercuts the trust and accountability upon which the rule of law is rooted in democracies, and a pattern of poor accountability over the long term can undermine the larger social compact within communities. Finally, responsible, effective policy cannot be created in a vacuum, but must be based on solid evidence and hard facts that can form the basis for sensible, fair policy.
The need is real. The cost to
taxpayers alone of poor policing practices is enormous; in 2006,
reporter Carol Marin of NBC's local television news affiliate
documented that the City of Chicago had spent $100 million over a
five-year period to settle court suits alleging police brutality or
other civil rights violations or police malfeasance.
Yet poor
public access to data from local policing and public criminal justice
agencies has made it extremely difficult to identify and take steps to
remediate the behavior of problem officers or clearly document and
revise practices that generate these costs.
Our work is designed to remove critical roadblocks to an open and just system of policing and criminal justice policy in the metropolitan Chicago area by giving people access to the information they need to assess and improve patterns and practices in the region.
CJP's projects and programs are designed to foster greater transparency and accountability as a way to cultivate greater cooperation and collaboration between grassroots residents and government agencies in modifying police practices and public policy. While the goal is to use this approach to better serve all local communities, this is a particular priority for CJP in communities whose residents are currently most vulnerable to the consequences of a lack of openness and transparency in our criminal justice system.
CJP recognizes three primary obstacles to reliable information about criminal justice issues, practices and policy:
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Collection: New technology has demonstrated imbalances in how agencies manage information.
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Retrieval: Agencies rely on litigation to compel responsiveness to FOIA requests.
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Distribution: Commercial news cycles limit public awareness of local justice issues by reporting primarily on individual crime incidents rather than systematic coverage of larger patterns and dynamics.
We also recognize that effective utilization of information is a crucial concern for community residents, advocates, and other stakeholders, and that our work must be grounded in the use of user-friendly technology, ongoing grassroots outreach, and sustained dialogue and collaboration with members of impacted communities. As a result, we've partnered with a range of stakeholders, from attorneys to community groups, to move this effort forward. We can point to a number of critical developments to date.
CODA Project
First, we've created the Civic Open Data Access Project, or the CODA Project, designed to remove a critical roadblock to an open and just system of policing and criminal justice policy in the metropolitan Chicago area - lack of access to statistics and information from our courts and public safety administrators. This data is by definition public, but as a practical matter, it is largely closed to the lens of public scrutiny. The CODA Project is, at its root, designed to build capacity in the justice field to collect and analyze data and make fact-based assessments of dynamics in the system, including data-driven strategies to improve policing practices and criminal justice policy. A local law firm with extensive practice experience in the arena of criminal justice and civil rights issues has donated more than a quarter of a million pages of documentation for our proof of concept. The Information Retrieval Laboratory at Illinois Institute of Technology has supported CJP with expert advice in identifying and evaluating the technology options defined for the CODA Project, including helping us define achievable solutions with proven technologies and will remain active as advisers on complex programming questions.
The CODA Project will warehouse and regularly update existing databases and data sets in a single web site, in many cases making much of this data available electronically to the public for the first time. CODA will use new technologies and innovations in programming to mash up data into more user-friendly, easily searchable formats, and marry these data sets on an ongoing basis with information made available through participating legal advocacy projects, law practices, public agencies, policy researchers, information provided through the Freedom of Information Act, and other supporting partners and projects.
We understand the potential of evolving technology to develop tools that allow the public to access and assess data as a way to a better understand and ultimately improve criminal justice and policing policies and practices. We also recognize that the data itself from court transcripts and depositions to district by district crime statistics and detailed data on law enforcement oversight and outcomes; is the linchpin in this system.
Freedom of Information Act
We're also working aggressively on a parallel track in a core area of expertise for CJP, the use of the Freedom of Information Act to utilize the FOIA process as a central way to generate data for public access, through CODA and other public information tools. This work includes the aggressive use of litigation in our efforts when needed. The significance of this part of our effort cannot be overstated, in no small part because the Freedom of Information Act remains one of the most significant and potent tools for ensuring public access to the civic processes of our public institutions and agencies. This work will continue to be made available to the public through our FOI Center on our website, and we expect to expand our efforts to reach out to core constituencies to encourage use of existing material and solicit input for ongoing efforts.
One of our key projects in the coming year is the research and authorship of a comprehensive report tracking ten years of voting patterns and outcomes for the Chicago Police Board for many years the City of Chicago's sole agency for disciplining officers in cases of brutality and wrongdoing. While the City has undertaken a revamping of this agency in the last year, to a great extent in the wake of years of public criticism of its lack of effectiveness, no comprehensive survey of its findings, procedures and policies has ever been undertaken. The data from this effort stands to make a substantial contribution to the ongoing civic effort to retool and improve Chicago's police accountability system.
Relationship Building
Our efforts over the next two years will also include continuing relationship-building with public officials to foster ongoing and growing support for CJP's mission and goals, including expanded access to data for later stages in CODA's development once the primary information architecture is fully deployed. We're also conducting a comprehensive research study of the current and historical status of access to public records that will be publicly disseminated and used as a basis to augment our efforts to preserve and expand access to public data. We're also developing a more formalized series of community-hosted focus groups to measure the needs and core concerns of our stakeholders, as a way to build upon the community outreach we've undertaken to targeted communities and impacted groups in the last year.
All of our efforts are driven by our core mission: to empower the public particularly those constituencies most commonly negatively impacted by criminal justice policy and practices to press for improvements in policy and practices by ensuring open access to timely and accurate public information from law enforcement, police and government agencies. We're committed, above all else, to fostering greater transparency and accountability and ultimately, a more productive basis for cooperation and collaboration between grassroots residents and government agencies in modifying police practices and public policy to better serve the community.
Information has the capacity to be enormously empowering. At the same time, lack of access to information undercuts a range of decisive rights and liberties, from the ability to effectively identify and document problems to the capacity to craft civically responsible solutions and exercise the core public accountability that is at the root of our system of governance. CJP's work is designed to democratize access to information within a widely replicable toolkit that has enormous potential to allow individuals and groups across the spectrum of local civil society to make the kind of informed assessments and proposals that will improve criminal justice policy across the spectrum of policing practices and imperatives.
