Today we filed with OEMC a new request under Illinois’ FOIA law related to call level data for every call for Chicago Police service for the year of 2013. We previously filed this request and received a very limited data set that is available for download if you follow the link. The original data set provided the least possible amount of data. We had agreed to allow OEMC to redacted exact addresses of the callers; however, it seems that OEMC instead redacted every piece of data they could possibly withhold.
After receiving this very limited data set from OEMC we filed an additional FOIA requesting a listing of every field they capture related to police calls for service and any documents that maintain the field descriptions. What we received has proven to us that OEMC withheld data fields from CJP that should have been provided and that this was done on purpose. The documents we received responsive to this FOIA request are available for download below.
Content of new FOIA request dated 3/31/15:
Under the Illinois Freedom of Information Act please provide the following records for my review:
Call level data for police calls for service for the years 2010-2014. Please make this data set as robust as possible. The data set provided for a prior FOIA request for calls for police service for 2013 was significantly and unecessarily restrictive. Your latest response to my FOIA regarding the fields that are included in the data entry for a police call for service includes many fields that were left out of your response for 2013. The fields left out include:
OCC Beat
Response Level
Event Chronology
Unit Summary with associated fields
Whether the caller requested to stay anonymous
Source for the call in service
FAOW
Actions
Disposition
Please make sure that all possible fields are included in your response. The only fields that should be redacted are those that would identify the caller. Any response to this FOAI that falls short of complete openness will responded too with litigation in the Cook County Circuit Court.
On April 9th CJP rece
On April 9th we received a response that seemed to deny our request. In addition to these two FOIAs CJP sent in an additional one in-between these two to seek a detailed list of the fields in OEMC’s database related to police calls for service. They sent us a screen capture. When we requested additional fields be added to the original request response based on the screen capture we were told by OEMC that a couple of the fields we requested aren’t fields but seperate reports and that they were denying our request. We have responded by removing those fields from our request and refiling…we will have to wait and see how OEMC responds, promptly and ethically or in the typical Chicago agency FOIA response.
To download the current data set you can follow this link.
On Thursday April 16th OEMC emailed CJP listing the fields they have in their database related to calls for Chicago Police service. Follow this link to access the PDF they sent CJP. We followed up on that email on Friday April 17th listing the following fields we would like them to include in the data set they provide CJP. Here are the fields we requested:
EVENT HISTORY TABLE:
- EntryDate: Date & Time the event was entered into the system
- CONDISPGROUP: District
- EVENTNUMBER: System-generated ID of the event
- FINPRIORITY: Final Priority of the event
- RESPAREA: Beat of Occurrance
- FINTYPE: Final Event Type
- FINDISPOSITION: Final Disposition Code (IUCR Code) of the event
- CONTACT: Whether the caller requested to stay anonymous
- INRESPOLEVEL: Final Response Level
EVENT CHRONOLOGY TABLE:
- DATE & TIME:
- WORKSTATION NAME
- ACTIVITY / SEGMENT NAME
UNIT SEGMENT TABLE:
- UNIT: Unit Associated with an event
- SEGMENTDATE: Date/Time segment
