Resources

A database containing several thousand data points on over 3,000 city and local police departments and sheriffs’ offices nationwide, allows citizens, journalists, and academics to review details about the technologies police are deploying, and provides a resource to check what devices and systems have been purchased locally. Built using crowdsourcing and data journalism over the last 18 months, the Atlas of Surveillance documents the alarming increase in the use of unchecked high-tech tools that collect biometric records, photos, and videos of people in their communities, locate and track them via their cell phones, and purport to predict where crimes will be committed.

What military equipment has your local police, sheriff or game warden received from the Pentagon? Click the dropdown on this resource to select your state and start sifting through the newly released data from the U.S. Department of Defense’s 1033 program.

This preliminary report summarizes what the Policing in Chicago Research Group has been able to discover, as well as what has yet to be learned, about Chicago’s gang database. Through a combination of in-depth interviews, Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests, and archival research, the Research Group sought to learn about impacts of the gang database and understand relationships between law enforcement agencies involved in tracking gang affiliation (e.g., the Chicago Police Department, the FBI, ICE, Illinois State Police, Cook County Sheriff’s Office, etc.).

This memo provides a review of the Cook County Sheriff’s Office’s (CCSO) Regional Gang Intelligence Database (RGID), which was decommissioned on January 15, 2019. It highlights CCSO policies and procedures for the gang database as well as its data-sharing agreements.

Although members of law enforcement do not serve as treatment providers for any other illness, they have become “road runners,” responding to mental health emergencies and traveling long distances to shuttle people with mental illness from one facility to another. This report is the first-ever national survey of sheriffs’ offices and police departments on these issues, and it provides a unique glimpse into the burdens they must shoulder as well as the fiscal and societal implications of the current situation. The survey responses represent 355 sheriffs’ offices and police departments in the United States.

Obtained from thousands of state agencies, prosecutors, police departments and sheriffs, the records detail at least 200,000 incidents of alleged misconduct, much of it previously unreported. The records obtained include more than 110,000 internal affairs investigations by hundreds of individual departments and more than 30,000 officers who were decertified by 44 state oversight agencies.