On September 14, 2026, the Chicago Justice Project submitted a Freedom of Information Act request to the Chicago Police Department seeking the underlying data behind Matrix Consulting Group’s “Report on the Workforce Allocation Study,” the March 27, 2026 staffing analysis that has shaped public conversation about how CPD deploys its officers. Less than four hours later, CPD denied the entire request.
The timeline
- 9:13 AM — CJP submits a ten-part FOIA request (Items A through J) to CPD.
- 10:14 AM — CPD’s FOIA Center acknowledges receipt, assigning tracking number P220663-091426.
- 12:55 PM — CPD sends a full denial, just 3 hours and 42 minutes after the request was filed.
For a request this detailed, that turnaround is worth sitting with. It’s hard to square a genuine, individual burden analysis, one that Illinois law actually requires, with a denial issued before the request had been in the building for half a business day.
What we asked for
The request sought the records CPD provided to Matrix Consulting Group to produce its staffing report, including:
- Computer-aided dispatch (CAD) and calls for service data underlying the report
- The two caseload datasets referenced on page 281 of the report, before and after CPD’s own filtering
- 2024 overtime data
- Personnel, assignment, and leave usage records used in the report’s “net availability” calculations
- CPD’s table of organization and current staffing and vacancy counts
- The 2022 to 2023 comparative survey data from other jurisdictions
- Earlier “Descriptive Profile” and “Framework” deliverables from the same study
- Contracts, invoices, and other financial records tied to Matrix’s engagement
- Emails between CPD and Matrix concerning the report
- Records showing CPD’s search efforts, as FOIA allows requesters to ask
In short: the data behind a report that will inform decisions about how Chicago polices its neighborhoods, and how much it pays Matrix Consulting Group to tell it so.
CPD’s rationale
CPD’s denial letter, signed by FOIA Officer R Earnshaw, rested on two arguments:
- “Voluminous request.” Under 5 ILCS 140/2(h)(i), a request is “voluminous” if it “includes more than 5 different categories of records.” CPD counted our ten labeled items (A through J) as ten categories and declared the whole request unduly burdensome without, as far as the letter shows, ever attempting to process any part of it or estimate an actual cost or hour burden, the analysis the statute’s burden narrowing provision, 5 ILCS 140/3(g), calls for.
- “Not records, but questions.” CPD also characterized part of the request (Item J, which asked CPD to document its own search efforts) as impermissibly asking it to “answer questions,” citing Kenyon v. Garrels.
CPD’s letter closed by inviting CJP to submit a new, narrower request, without identifying which of the ten items it considered reasonable, or making any counteroffer of its own.
Why is CPD responding this way? What is it hiding?
For decades, CPD has either lied outright to the public or hidden data and records from researchers that would allow real insight into staffing levels across the city. Part of the reason is political. A public that is often convinced, wrongly, that staffing levels alone are strongly correlated with crime and violence rates is a public CPD would rather not hand raw data to. Misread numbers become headlines fast, and CPD knows it.
The other reason is more basic: CPD, as an institution, is so affected by corruption and incompetence that it likely cannot accurately say how many officers it has in specific districts and units at any given moment.
Officers are routinely moved from unit to unit and district to district, for reasons both legitimate and not, which makes it genuinely hard to pin down how many officers truly work in a given district on a given day. CPD has longstanding practices where officers assigned to special units swipe in at their “assigned district” and then travel to wherever that special unit actually operates, which makes staffing numbers look higher across those districts than reality supports. Districts sometimes have to request officers be detailed in from elsewhere to cover shortfalls caused by their own officers being detailed out to special units elsewhere.
With that much churn, only a modern, well-built staffing system could track it accurately in real time. There is little reason to believe CPD’s data systems are anywhere close to that standard, and a same-day denial of a detailed, well-organized request does nothing to suggest otherwise.
Why this matters
Illinois FOIA doesn’t let a public body treat “more than five categories” as an automatic bar to disclosure. The law requires the agency to show compliance would actually be unduly burdensome, that there is no way to narrow the request, and that the burden outweighs the public’s interest in the records, a fact specific balancing test, not a box to check off a table of contents. A request organized into clearly labeled, specific categories, the format FOIA officers themselves often ask requesters to use, shouldn’t be penalized for that structure.
It’s also worth noting what’s at stake here. This isn’t a request for CPD’s internal deliberations. It’s a request for the data behind a report that a publicly funded consulting firm produced to justify how CPD allocates its workforce across the city. The public has a direct interest in checking that data against the report’s conclusions, and in knowing whether CPD’s own numbers can be trusted at all.
CJP intends to pursue this further, including seeking review from the Illinois Attorney General’s Public Access Counselor. We’ll continue to update readers as this moves forward.
