Follow-Up Inquiry on the Chicago Police Department's “Gang Database”

In April 2019, the City of Chicago Office of Inspector General (OIG) published a report on the Chicago Police Department’s (CPD) so-called “gang database.” OIG reported that CPD captured, reported, and visualized gang data and gang affiliation designations in at least 18 different forms, records, and systems of records. OIG found that CPD’s Gang Arrest Cards, one of the Department’s largest repositories of gang information, evidenced wide-reaching data quality concerns. OIG also found in 2019 that CPD had no mechanism for informing individuals that they had been designated as a gang member; did not have processes for individuals to contest or appeal gang designations; did not have processes to regularly review or purge outdated or faulty designations; and had no internal mechanism to amend inaccurate gang information. This follow-up report provides an update on the status of CPD’s collection and maintenance of gang data, as well as CPD’s progress on the commitments formally made in response to OIG’s April 2019 recommendations. Specifically, the objectives of this report were to determine the current status of CPD’s planned gang intelligence database, now known in CPD’s draft General Order G10-01-03 as the “Criminal Enterprise Information System” (CEIS); to assess CPD’s progress toward fully articulating the strategic purpose and value of collecting and storing information on individuals presumed to be involved in gangs; to evaluate the extent of CPD’s community engagement in planning the launch of the CEIS and the extent of CPD’s responsiveness to community concerns. OIG reached three new findings herein: CPD has made minimal progress toward an operational CEIS; CPD has not clearly and specifically articulated the strategic value of its proposed system for collecting gang affiliation information; and CPD has taken some measures to adopt community feedback on its gang data collection, but for eight months, it offered a public-facing description of the CEIS which may have been misleading with respect to a key policy concern.