The Citizens Police Data Project (CPDP.co) is a tool for holding police accountable to the public they serve.

Citizens 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.

Originally intended to serve as a national model for transparency, the Citizens Police Data Project emerged from a decade-long collaboration with the University of Chicago Law School’s Mandel Legal Aid Clinic. CPDP is now the hub of several inter-woven projects and partnerships that share the common goal of making police data more useful to the public through transparency, investigation, and accountability. CPDP has been cited in a variety of academic research; read a collection of thoughtful uses of the data here.

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.

The codebase and the growing collection of underlying datasets plus data processing scripts and the original FOIA responses are available publicly here:

What’s next?

Our work on CPDP today can be organized into three key areas.

Strengthening the core frameworks by steadily improving our site in Chicago and becoming more efficient at keeping the information on CPDP.co up-to-date for the investigative journalists, community organizers, and civil rights attorneys who rely on it every day. 

Deepening the investigation by identifying trends and patterns in data that require more long term strategy. Beneath the Surface uses data science and narrative justice to learn from the stories of female survivors of police misconduct and identify other themes within the misconduct data that is the Chicago Police Department.  

Expanding the impact by cultivating our network of partners and allies in other cities (New Orleans, Dallas, New York City, Oakland, San Francisco, Washington, DC), and working together with community leaders and stakeholders to find ways to make public data accessible beyond Chicago.