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Chicago Police Department shuts down its arrest API

makotech222 6y ago
Everything you know and think about what the cops do and how they do it is built on many, many decades of copaganda you receive from the media. They are a force which exists to terrorize working class people in order to force them to work for minimum wage. They are an investment by the ruling class which allows them to maintain their profits on marginalized workers. They funnel poor people into prison camps where they can be paid 10 cents an hour to make profits for ruling class. Defund the police!
- bachmeier 6y ago
  You might be reading a little too much into the article. It's possible you're bringing outside views into the discussion.
  - kazagistar 6y ago
    Pretty sure that the points of a comments section is bringing in outside information.
    - pwillia7 6y ago
      Could have used some cites though.
  - catalogia 6y ago
    > It's possible you're bringing outside views into the discussion. It's literally impossible for anybody to ever not. There's no such thing as a blank slate human who's capable of conversing. Edit for response: To be clear, I don't think makotech222 argued their point well. But expecting people to enter a conversation without any outside ideas influencing their mindset is patently absurd.
    - throwaway894345 6y ago
      Ideally they would have some basis in reality as demonstrated by some accompanying supporting evidence. I don’t think that’s asking too much.
- radicalidiot 6y ago
  no thanks. you could say the same thing about the liberal media feeding you the idea "pigs are bad". you're nothing but a radical. chicago is already a war zone. you bubble boys crack me the fuck up! you've never met a criminal in your life. they are salivating over you idiots pushing this. - from the streets to tech, i've seen shit you people never will.
- throwaway894345 6y ago
  Speaking as a former working-class person from a long lineage of working class people, this is obviously and overt nonsense. The criminal justice system and the (highly distributed) institution of policing in particular must be improved and reformed, but the idea that they "oppress working class people" in any meaningful way is severely disconnected from reality (well, communist countries notwithstanding). EDIT: Wow, this post was downvoted the very moment I posted it (<1s). Good work HN. EDIT 2: retracted claim that the parent was lying as opposed to the more charitable interpretation of their error.
  - happytoexplain 6y ago
    I don't think you had to go as far as asserting that the parent is overtly lying. It's far from impossible to honestly believe the police "oppress working class people", especially if you have any personal experience to bias your view that way.
    - throwaway894345 6y ago
      Fair enough, I should have been more charitable.
      - happytoexplain 6y ago
        I see you edited to remove the accusation of lying, but you left in "this is obviously and overt nonsense", which is pretty hostile and low value. Edit: You also added "as opposed to the more charitable interpretation of their error", which is very passive aggressive and elitist.
        deleted 6y ago
        [deleted]
    - wolco 6y ago
      Police come from working class backgrounds. It is usually the lower class not the working class who gets oppressed.
- hpoe 6y ago
  You are right comrade. The workers must unite! We must rise up and overthrow the bourgeois and sieze the means of production. Is a man not a man I say? Why should some live in comfort and others in squealer? What has the capitalist given society? Dead honest men. All institutions are built to ensure the means of production do not change, we must overthrow the police that oppress, the government that oppresses, religion the opiate of the people, the military as their jack booted thugs, all must go. They steal food from the orphan and place it as caviar on the capitalist plate. LET US RISE UP BROTHERS ONLY THE PROLETARIAT IS JUST! WE BUILD THE DICTATORSHIP OF THE PROLETARIAT ON THE BROKEN BACK OF THE CAPITALIST! RISE UP COMRADES, RISE UP, RISE UP! I'll leave Poe's law at play here
- randompwd 6y ago
  It's really strange that all your comments going back to 2017 are pushing just pretty-far-left narratives and 0 purely technical comments. Is this a paid gig for you or do you troll on your own time?
- tasty_freeze 6y ago
  Lenny Bruce on who the police serve (part of a larger bit): https://youtu.be/CjBpbCceQjg?t=611 https://youtu.be/CjBpbCceQjg?t=611
- dddeeerrr9999 6y ago
  >They funnel poor people into prison camps Its worse than that. A vast proportion of non-white crime is manufactured by cops and the media to scare whites into bringing back slavery in all but name. Black neighborhoods are actually the safest places in America if racist cops would stop harassing innocent citizens just because they are PoC. Black Lives Matter!
  - monoideism 6y ago
    So you think that the "vast proportion" of the non-white shootings we see in inner cities are manufactured by the media and police? Do you mean they make them up? I'm really not following here.
    - dx87 6y ago
      I'm pretty sure their comment is a parody of the parent comment that makes a lot of outrageous claims with no evidence, followed by a slogan you can chant at protests.
      - monoideism 6y ago
        I thought so at first, but then I look at the comment history, and some doubt seeped in. I'm honestly not sure if you're right or not. I often can't tell anymore.
  - optimiz3 6y ago
    > A vast proportion of non-white crime is manufactured by cops and the media to scare whites into bringing back slavery in all but name. Black neighborhoods are actually the safest places in America if racist cops would stop harassing innocent citizens just because they are PoC. These are pretty sensational claims, do you have hard statistically relevant evidence for this?
  - dang 6y ago
    We've banned this account for trolling. Please don't create accounts to break HN's rules with. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
save_ferris 6y ago
It's crazy to me that in 2020, there isn't comprehensive, mandatory Federal tracking of police-involved shootings. There's no reason that this data shouldn't be mandated to be aggregated and researched, other than to continue propagating a culture of secrecy. From the FBI's Use-of-Force data collection site[0]: > Is it mandatory for law enforcement agencies to contribute to this data collection? > The FBI has no legal authority to mandate reporting of any data to the UCR Program. The FBI is working closely with the major law enforcement agency organizations and the CJIS APB, which is composed of local, state, tribal, and federal law enforcement partners, to obtain broad support and forge commitments from these members to report this critical information. National support is garnered through working partnerships with national law enforcement agencies as well. The National Use-of-Force Data Collection and community participation to report data will likely continue to evolve. All data collected at the Federal level is voluntary, that's just unacceptable. 0: https://www.fbi.gov/services/cjis/ucr/use-of-force https://www.fbi.gov/services/cjis/ucr/use-of-force
- nickff 6y ago
  Why should everything be federalized? There is no article in the constitution which mandates (or permits) federal supervision of state powers (such as the police power). The fact that voters fail to hold their lower-level governments to account does not mean that all power (and failure) should be centralized.
  - elliekelly 6y ago
    The federal government is responsible for enforcing citizens’ civil rights when states can’t, won’t or don’t.
    - nickff 6y ago
      You're begging the question here; you need to explain your reasoning as to how and why your beliefs are true, rather than simply asserting them.
      - 6y ago
rmason 6y ago
Sadly this isn't the first time this has happened in the history of open data. I remember when Kalamazoo's crimes API got shut down by the chief of police. It still has not returned. The true test of open data is when people use its information to criticize public officials and it doesn't disappear.
tptacek 6y ago
A lot of this reporting work came from 'bpchaps, for what it's worth; he's been doing awesome data journalism work (in part with the Low Orbit Ion Cannon of FOIA infrastructures), which he's written about and discussed on HN; for instance: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17754105 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17754105 More people should be doing this stuff.
tehwebguy 6y ago
Article says they still have access to a less-useful access tool, can someone help set them up with a scraper?
- mattbit 6y ago
  “Obtaining structured data from this system is costly and time-consuming due to the need to tell the system you’re not a robot every few searches. It also doesn’t include some key categories of information formerly available via the API, including the primary charge, bond hearing dates, IR number, and the FBI code associated with the type of arrest.”
aahhahahaaa 6y ago
Incredibly telling that the police still pull this type of thing despite how laser-focused everyone is on their behavior right now. It's almost as if they've been institutionalized to think they're better than everyone else. Defund the police and use the money for mental health and human services. Local police service data should be randomly audited by the feds and independent third parties.
- ronanyeah 6y ago
  Open crime data should be mandatory for every police force, let citizens do the auditing.
- twsttest 6y ago
  >"Defund the police and use the money for mental health and human services." That doesn't address the cancer of gang violence and other violence that police need to deal with constantly. "Mental health and human services" will not address these problems. Most people committing crime had an opportunity to go to school and participate in legal society. They choose not to. The future of America is that of a lawless gangland like Mexico if the police are "defunded".
  - thephyber 6y ago
    Even police departments don't send their paramilitary groups (eg. "SWAT") to every scene, police don't need to be at every emergency call. In fact, this is already the case -- when you call 911 for a medical emergency, an ambulance or medical fire department unit shows up (usually alone). In the same way, "defund the police" means use police more judiciously, not necessarily eliminate police. > The future of America is that of a lawless gangland like Mexico if the police are "defunded". Citation needed. Gang violence in the US has been declining for more than 2 decades, even as the population grows and US police case closure rates are far below 50%. Police don't have as much effectiveness or as good of a reputation with innocent civilians in gang territory as I imagine you think. Also, a significant portion of the US already has and carries guns, so it's not like gang violence would just expand boundless even if there were no police.
  - 6y ago
mthoms 6y ago
I'm amazed that someone with the title of "Assistant Director of Communications" actually wrote this meaningless, word salad of gibberish: >"We looked into this and confirmed with our IT Department that API was a tool that was previously available at one point, but has been discontinued / turned off. The API Access site is stagnant and not being monitored and should have been pulled down once the tool was no longer publicly accessible, and as a result, requests for access were not being reviewed.” The best translation I can come up with seems to be "The API used to exist, but was turned off because it was turned off".
- tsimionescu 6y ago
  It sounds even worse to me. It seems to say 'we thought we had turned that off sometime ago, but we didn't actually take down the public site which gave access to it. In the past, we would have reviewed any request for data through the API, but since we thought we had stopped public access, we were accidentally giving data away without checking if we are actually on with people knowing these things'.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
ryantuck 6y ago
Wonder if they shut down their asSOAP API as well
fzeroracer 6y ago
I'm not sure why the title was revised. The story makes a strong case that the reason why the arrest API was removed was because the Chicago Reporter used said API to prove that they were lying about their original claims. Now they refuse to comment on why it was removed and are ignoring any FOIA requests to actually get the data. In attempt to make the title more neutral it seems like it made it more biased in favor of what seems like a corrupt police department.
rs23296008n1 6y ago
Police especially don't have many excuses for hiding their actions since they are meant to enforce the law. It used to surprise me just how many pointless secrets are kept by government departments in open democracies. But who watches the watchers? I think police departments and government can do better. Removing data implies a lack of transparency. Transparency and being seen to be improving at "doing the right thing" should be core targets right now. This isn’t just about police either. I should be able to look up a lot more. Open democracies, informed voters, right? Regular, yearly/monthly data dumps should be commonplace. How else are modern democracies meant to function? Lobby groups? How 20th century!
unethical_ban 6y ago
Actual, unmodified title as of Thu Jul 9 1609 CDT: Chicago Police Department arrest API shutdown is its own kind of ‘cover up’
alexilliamson 6y ago
The is slightly OT, but I just want to throw it out there that there is no way they did this without Mayor Lightfoot's approval. Which makes me think, why? Source: I worked closely with CPD and to some extent the mayor's office for two years.
mtgx 6y ago
If they have nothing to hide, what are they afraid of...?
jb775 6y ago
I believe government data should be much more openly accessible, but it's hard to blame anyone for removing a tool provided by them that's being used against them.
MisterBastahrd 6y ago
Professionally, I could see defense attorneys being very concerned by this. Internally and among colleagues? They're howling with laughter at the hypocrisy of cops who love the idea of "if you're doing nothing wrong, there's nothing to hide."
barnyfried 6y ago
If you defund things, you get fewer services. Defund McDonalds, and then go see if you get a cheeseburger. Nothing is free.
lokar 6y ago
Am I reading that wrong or are the quotes from police and gov saying saying "offenders" when they mean "people accused of a crime and presumed innocent" ?
- notRobot 6y ago
  Unfortunately, "innocent until proven guilty" is rarely what cops in the US believe. In most cases, they just care about making arrests, not about finding the actual culprit.
  - lokar 6y ago
    Yeah, but most politicians at least pretend.
BLKNSLVR 6y ago
I think calls to defund the police are well over-stepping the clean-up that's obviously required, but that stance continues to soften in light of situations like this (and the increasing use of encrypted police radio comms and decreased open-ness with journalists)
yummypaint 6y ago
The chicago PD and it's notorious lawlessness is the single biggest thing preventing me from moving to the area despite a good professional fit and available jobs. I must not be the only one. If I ran a company I wouldn't be willing to subject my employees to those hazards either. Maybe it's worth complaining to the chamber of commerce... public officials seem to have done little to fix anything, maybe involving the people pulling the strings could move the needle.
- twsttest 6y ago
  You think the Chicago PD is lawless? It's the criminals, crime and general lawlessness in Chicago that is causing over 40 people to routinely be shot each weekend in Chicago. The rampant lies and misrepresentations about police will only cause more crime, deaths and lawlessness as police choose to retire and decent people who may have been considering becoming police will decide to not subject themselves to the constant and unjustified abuse meted out by the public and politicians which police have to endure.
  - zach_garwood 6y ago
    Hi, Chicago resident here. The CPD is under a consent decree that they do not follow, their officers have rioted against protesters and stood by watching looting occur, and every year they incur tens (if not hundreds) of millions of dollars of debt for the city and it's taxpayers for police misconduct settlements. So yeah, I think it's fair to say CPD is lawless. As for your assertion that "rampant lies and misrepresentations" caused the decline of the police profession, the idiom isn't "criticism of the apple barrel spoils the whole bunch." The police do damage to their own reputation by not removing the "bad apples," moreso than anybody who critices the police.
ibspoof 6y ago
RIP https://heyjackass.com/ https://heyjackass.com/
vinceguidry 6y ago
This strikes me as remarkably similar to the "crown jewels" problem of API availability. Simply stated, it's that it's the hardest sell in the world to expect a company to expend money and resources to act against its own interests, and applied to governmental organizations like the police, no appointed official is going to stomach spending money making themselves look bad. More broadly stated, you can't solve accountability problems by asking people to step up and be more accountable. The only way is to impose rules from above. And even that won't work if there's actual bad faith involved. Police depts issuing rules on body camera usage will find that the cameras just don't work when they'd make individual officers look bad. I'm sure CPD had the best of intentions when it created its API. But as soon as a journo ran an article using it to make them look bad, regardless of how right it was, means their access was going to get revoked. Nobody forced them to put out an API, and it just became a political liability. Of course it's going to go away.
- thephyber 6y ago
  > More broadly stated, you can't solve accountability problems by asking people to step up and be more accountable. The only way is to impose rules from above. > But as soon as a journo ran an article using it to make them look bad, regardless of how right it was, means their access was going to get revoked. No. This is specific (but not exclusive) to their culture. If NASA has this toxic culture, we would lose more than 50% of all rocket payloads and astronauts. Programmers who have this mentality are defensive about their code (as if any criticism of their code is an attack on their ego) never grow and quickly turn the culture around them very negative.
  - vinceguidry 6y ago
    If we had a million NASAs all over the country, they wouldn't all be paragons of professionalism.

Everything you know and think about what the cops do and how they do it is built on many, many decades of copaganda you receive from the media. They are a force which exists to terrorize working class people in order to force them to work for minimum wage. They are an investment by the ruling class which allows them to maintain their profits on marginalized workers. They funnel poor people into prison camps where they can be paid 10 cents an hour to make profits for ruling class. Defund the police!

bachmeier 6y ago
You might be reading a little too much into the article. It's possible you're bringing outside views into the discussion.
- kazagistar 6y ago
  Pretty sure that the points of a comments section is bringing in outside information.
  - pwillia7 6y ago
    Could have used some cites though.
- catalogia 6y ago
  > It's possible you're bringing outside views into the discussion. It's literally impossible for anybody to ever not. There's no such thing as a blank slate human who's capable of conversing. Edit for response: To be clear, I don't think makotech222 argued their point well. But expecting people to enter a conversation without any outside ideas influencing their mindset is patently absurd.
  - throwaway894345 6y ago
    Ideally they would have some basis in reality as demonstrated by some accompanying supporting evidence. I don’t think that’s asking too much.
radicalidiot 6y ago
no thanks. you could say the same thing about the liberal media feeding you the idea "pigs are bad". you're nothing but a radical. chicago is already a war zone. you bubble boys crack me the fuck up! you've never met a criminal in your life. they are salivating over you idiots pushing this. - from the streets to tech, i've seen shit you people never will.
throwaway894345 6y ago
Speaking as a former working-class person from a long lineage of working class people, this is obviously and overt nonsense. The criminal justice system and the (highly distributed) institution of policing in particular must be improved and reformed, but the idea that they "oppress working class people" in any meaningful way is severely disconnected from reality (well, communist countries notwithstanding). EDIT: Wow, this post was downvoted the very moment I posted it (<1s). Good work HN. EDIT 2: retracted claim that the parent was lying as opposed to the more charitable interpretation of their error.
- happytoexplain 6y ago
  I don't think you had to go as far as asserting that the parent is overtly lying. It's far from impossible to honestly believe the police "oppress working class people", especially if you have any personal experience to bias your view that way.
  - throwaway894345 6y ago
    Fair enough, I should have been more charitable.
    - happytoexplain 6y ago
      I see you edited to remove the accusation of lying, but you left in "this is obviously and overt nonsense", which is pretty hostile and low value. Edit: You also added "as opposed to the more charitable interpretation of their error", which is very passive aggressive and elitist.
      - deleted 6y ago
        [deleted]
  - wolco 6y ago
    Police come from working class backgrounds. It is usually the lower class not the working class who gets oppressed.
hpoe 6y ago
You are right comrade. The workers must unite! We must rise up and overthrow the bourgeois and sieze the means of production. Is a man not a man I say? Why should some live in comfort and others in squealer? What has the capitalist given society? Dead honest men. All institutions are built to ensure the means of production do not change, we must overthrow the police that oppress, the government that oppresses, religion the opiate of the people, the military as their jack booted thugs, all must go. They steal food from the orphan and place it as caviar on the capitalist plate. LET US RISE UP BROTHERS ONLY THE PROLETARIAT IS JUST! WE BUILD THE DICTATORSHIP OF THE PROLETARIAT ON THE BROKEN BACK OF THE CAPITALIST! RISE UP COMRADES, RISE UP, RISE UP! I'll leave Poe's law at play here
randompwd 6y ago
It's really strange that all your comments going back to 2017 are pushing just pretty-far-left narratives and 0 purely technical comments. Is this a paid gig for you or do you troll on your own time?
tasty_freeze 6y ago
Lenny Bruce on who the police serve (part of a larger bit): https://youtu.be/CjBpbCceQjg?t=611 https://youtu.be/CjBpbCceQjg?t=611
dddeeerrr9999 6y ago
>They funnel poor people into prison camps Its worse than that. A vast proportion of non-white crime is manufactured by cops and the media to scare whites into bringing back slavery in all but name. Black neighborhoods are actually the safest places in America if racist cops would stop harassing innocent citizens just because they are PoC. Black Lives Matter!
- monoideism 6y ago
  So you think that the "vast proportion" of the non-white shootings we see in inner cities are manufactured by the media and police? Do you mean they make them up? I'm really not following here.
  - dx87 6y ago
    I'm pretty sure their comment is a parody of the parent comment that makes a lot of outrageous claims with no evidence, followed by a slogan you can chant at protests.
    - monoideism 6y ago
      I thought so at first, but then I look at the comment history, and some doubt seeped in. I'm honestly not sure if you're right or not. I often can't tell anymore.
- optimiz3 6y ago
  > A vast proportion of non-white crime is manufactured by cops and the media to scare whites into bringing back slavery in all but name. Black neighborhoods are actually the safest places in America if racist cops would stop harassing innocent citizens just because they are PoC. These are pretty sensational claims, do you have hard statistically relevant evidence for this?
- dang 6y ago
  We've banned this account for trolling. Please don't create accounts to break HN's rules with. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

save_ferris 6y ago

It's crazy to me that in 2020, there isn't comprehensive, mandatory Federal tracking of police-involved shootings. There's no reason that this data shouldn't be mandated to be aggregated and researched, other than to continue propagating a culture of secrecy. From the FBI's Use-of-Force data collection site[0]: > Is it mandatory for law enforcement agencies to contribute to this data collection? > The FBI has no legal authority to mandate reporting of any data to the UCR Program. The FBI is working closely with the major law enforcement agency organizations and the CJIS APB, which is composed of local, state, tribal, and federal law enforcement partners, to obtain broad support and forge commitments from these members to report this critical information. National support is garnered through working partnerships with national law enforcement agencies as well. The National Use-of-Force Data Collection and community participation to report data will likely continue to evolve. All data collected at the Federal level is voluntary, that's just unacceptable. 0: https://www.fbi.gov/services/cjis/ucr/use-of-force https://www.fbi.gov/services/cjis/ucr/use-of-force

nickff 6y ago
Why should everything be federalized? There is no article in the constitution which mandates (or permits) federal supervision of state powers (such as the police power). The fact that voters fail to hold their lower-level governments to account does not mean that all power (and failure) should be centralized.
- elliekelly 6y ago
  The federal government is responsible for enforcing citizens’ civil rights when states can’t, won’t or don’t.
  - nickff 6y ago
    You're begging the question here; you need to explain your reasoning as to how and why your beliefs are true, rather than simply asserting them.
    - 6y ago

rmason 6y ago

Sadly this isn't the first time this has happened in the history of open data. I remember when Kalamazoo's crimes API got shut down by the chief of police. It still has not returned. The true test of open data is when people use its information to criticize public officials and it doesn't disappear.

tptacek 6y ago

A lot of this reporting work came from 'bpchaps, for what it's worth; he's been doing awesome data journalism work (in part with the Low Orbit Ion Cannon of FOIA infrastructures), which he's written about and discussed on HN; for instance: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17754105 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17754105 More people should be doing this stuff.

tehwebguy 6y ago

Article says they still have access to a less-useful access tool, can someone help set them up with a scraper?

mattbit 6y ago
“Obtaining structured data from this system is costly and time-consuming due to the need to tell the system you’re not a robot every few searches. It also doesn’t include some key categories of information formerly available via the API, including the primary charge, bond hearing dates, IR number, and the FBI code associated with the type of arrest.”

aahhahahaaa 6y ago

Incredibly telling that the police still pull this type of thing despite how laser-focused everyone is on their behavior right now. It's almost as if they've been institutionalized to think they're better than everyone else. Defund the police and use the money for mental health and human services. Local police service data should be randomly audited by the feds and independent third parties.

ronanyeah 6y ago
Open crime data should be mandatory for every police force, let citizens do the auditing.
twsttest 6y ago
>"Defund the police and use the money for mental health and human services." That doesn't address the cancer of gang violence and other violence that police need to deal with constantly. "Mental health and human services" will not address these problems. Most people committing crime had an opportunity to go to school and participate in legal society. They choose not to. The future of America is that of a lawless gangland like Mexico if the police are "defunded".
- thephyber 6y ago
  Even police departments don't send their paramilitary groups (eg. "SWAT") to every scene, police don't need to be at every emergency call. In fact, this is already the case -- when you call 911 for a medical emergency, an ambulance or medical fire department unit shows up (usually alone). In the same way, "defund the police" means use police more judiciously, not necessarily eliminate police. > The future of America is that of a lawless gangland like Mexico if the police are "defunded". Citation needed. Gang violence in the US has been declining for more than 2 decades, even as the population grows and US police case closure rates are far below 50%. Police don't have as much effectiveness or as good of a reputation with innocent civilians in gang territory as I imagine you think. Also, a significant portion of the US already has and carries guns, so it's not like gang violence would just expand boundless even if there were no police.
- 6y ago

mthoms 6y ago

I'm amazed that someone with the title of "Assistant Director of Communications" actually wrote this meaningless, word salad of gibberish: >"We looked into this and confirmed with our IT Department that API was a tool that was previously available at one point, but has been discontinued / turned off. The API Access site is stagnant and not being monitored and should have been pulled down once the tool was no longer publicly accessible, and as a result, requests for access were not being reviewed.” The best translation I can come up with seems to be "The API used to exist, but was turned off because it was turned off".

tsimionescu 6y ago
It sounds even worse to me. It seems to say 'we thought we had turned that off sometime ago, but we didn't actually take down the public site which gave access to it. In the past, we would have reviewed any request for data through the API, but since we thought we had stopped public access, we were accidentally giving data away without checking if we are actually on with people knowing these things'.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

ryantuck 6y ago

Wonder if they shut down their asSOAP API as well

fzeroracer 6y ago

I'm not sure why the title was revised. The story makes a strong case that the reason why the arrest API was removed was because the Chicago Reporter used said API to prove that they were lying about their original claims. Now they refuse to comment on why it was removed and are ignoring any FOIA requests to actually get the data. In attempt to make the title more neutral it seems like it made it more biased in favor of what seems like a corrupt police department.

rs23296008n1 6y ago

Police especially don't have many excuses for hiding their actions since they are meant to enforce the law. It used to surprise me just how many pointless secrets are kept by government departments in open democracies. But who watches the watchers? I think police departments and government can do better. Removing data implies a lack of transparency. Transparency and being seen to be improving at "doing the right thing" should be core targets right now. This isn’t just about police either. I should be able to look up a lot more. Open democracies, informed voters, right? Regular, yearly/monthly data dumps should be commonplace. How else are modern democracies meant to function? Lobby groups? How 20th century!

unethical_ban 6y ago

Actual, unmodified title as of Thu Jul 9 1609 CDT: Chicago Police Department arrest API shutdown is its own kind of ‘cover up’

alexilliamson 6y ago

The is slightly OT, but I just want to throw it out there that there is no way they did this without Mayor Lightfoot's approval. Which makes me think, why? Source: I worked closely with CPD and to some extent the mayor's office for two years.

mtgx 6y ago

If they have nothing to hide, what are they afraid of...?

jb775 6y ago

I believe government data should be much more openly accessible, but it's hard to blame anyone for removing a tool provided by them that's being used against them.

MisterBastahrd 6y ago

Professionally, I could see defense attorneys being very concerned by this. Internally and among colleagues? They're howling with laughter at the hypocrisy of cops who love the idea of "if you're doing nothing wrong, there's nothing to hide."

barnyfried 6y ago

If you defund things, you get fewer services. Defund McDonalds, and then go see if you get a cheeseburger. Nothing is free.

lokar 6y ago

Am I reading that wrong or are the quotes from police and gov saying saying "offenders" when they mean "people accused of a crime and presumed innocent" ?

notRobot 6y ago
Unfortunately, "innocent until proven guilty" is rarely what cops in the US believe. In most cases, they just care about making arrests, not about finding the actual culprit.
- lokar 6y ago
  Yeah, but most politicians at least pretend.

BLKNSLVR 6y ago

I think calls to defund the police are well over-stepping the clean-up that's obviously required, but that stance continues to soften in light of situations like this (and the increasing use of encrypted police radio comms and decreased open-ness with journalists)

yummypaint 6y ago

The chicago PD and it's notorious lawlessness is the single biggest thing preventing me from moving to the area despite a good professional fit and available jobs. I must not be the only one. If I ran a company I wouldn't be willing to subject my employees to those hazards either. Maybe it's worth complaining to the chamber of commerce... public officials seem to have done little to fix anything, maybe involving the people pulling the strings could move the needle.

twsttest 6y ago
You think the Chicago PD is lawless? It's the criminals, crime and general lawlessness in Chicago that is causing over 40 people to routinely be shot each weekend in Chicago. The rampant lies and misrepresentations about police will only cause more crime, deaths and lawlessness as police choose to retire and decent people who may have been considering becoming police will decide to not subject themselves to the constant and unjustified abuse meted out by the public and politicians which police have to endure.
- zach_garwood 6y ago
  Hi, Chicago resident here. The CPD is under a consent decree that they do not follow, their officers have rioted against protesters and stood by watching looting occur, and every year they incur tens (if not hundreds) of millions of dollars of debt for the city and it's taxpayers for police misconduct settlements. So yeah, I think it's fair to say CPD is lawless. As for your assertion that "rampant lies and misrepresentations" caused the decline of the police profession, the idiom isn't "criticism of the apple barrel spoils the whole bunch." The police do damage to their own reputation by not removing the "bad apples," moreso than anybody who critices the police.

ibspoof 6y ago

RIP https://heyjackass.com/ https://heyjackass.com/

vinceguidry 6y ago

This strikes me as remarkably similar to the "crown jewels" problem of API availability. Simply stated, it's that it's the hardest sell in the world to expect a company to expend money and resources to act against its own interests, and applied to governmental organizations like the police, no appointed official is going to stomach spending money making themselves look bad. More broadly stated, you can't solve accountability problems by asking people to step up and be more accountable. The only way is to impose rules from above. And even that won't work if there's actual bad faith involved. Police depts issuing rules on body camera usage will find that the cameras just don't work when they'd make individual officers look bad. I'm sure CPD had the best of intentions when it created its API. But as soon as a journo ran an article using it to make them look bad, regardless of how right it was, means their access was going to get revoked. Nobody forced them to put out an API, and it just became a political liability. Of course it's going to go away.

thephyber 6y ago
> More broadly stated, you can't solve accountability problems by asking people to step up and be more accountable. The only way is to impose rules from above. > But as soon as a journo ran an article using it to make them look bad, regardless of how right it was, means their access was going to get revoked. No. This is specific (but not exclusive) to their culture. If NASA has this toxic culture, we would lose more than 50% of all rocket payloads and astronauts. Programmers who have this mentality are defensive about their code (as if any criticism of their code is an attack on their ego) never grow and quickly turn the culture around them very negative.
- vinceguidry 6y ago
  If we had a million NASAs all over the country, they wouldn't all be paragons of professionalism.