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by modriano 1801 days ago
100%.

I've largely been focused on implementing recommendations from a PERF report on Chicago homicide investigations [0] after years of attrition in the Bureau of Detectives collided with a massive spike in violent crime (in 2016, following the Laquan McDonald murder). My main projects have centered on developing CPD's capacity for recovering video evidence (mainly CCTV) in homicide and shooting cases, as well as teaching a special detail of detectives how to convert footage from proprietary codecs to standard codecs in a forensically sounds way (so that the footage can actually be viewed by less technologically savvy detectives and assistant state's attorney's). You can view seeking-to-identify focused samples of collected footage on CPD's YouTube channel [1] (although these are not representative of the breadth of footage now collected on each homicide). It's not as polished as LAPD's productions [2], but that's to be expected considering the well developed entertainment and digital media workforce in LA.

Although I do want to praise Chicago for it's willingness to make data available publicly. I had been pushing for years to get shooting data posted publicly and we just got that added to the data portal in May [3]. Additionally, the Cook County State's Attorneys Office puts a lot of their case data on the CCSAO data portal [4]. These are only a tiny fraction of the tables in CPD's or CCSAO's respective data warehouses, but as far as public data ecosystems go, Chicago's is the least bad I've worked with of major US cities. Working with LAPD's or NYPD's open data is a real pain.

[0] https://home.chicagopolice.org/homicideclearancereport2019/

[1] https://youtube.com/c/ChicagoPoliceNews

[2] https://youtube.com/c/LAPDONLINE1

[3] https://data.cityofchicago.org/Public-Safety/Violence-Reduct...

[4] https://datacatalog.cookcountyil.gov/browse?tags=state%27s+a...

1 comments

Wow! You and I actually have very similar roles.