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We are using the Wiki to share documents, context, and other accompanying materials for this project.

Who are we?

The Invisible Institute is a non-profit journalistic production company whose mission is to enhance the capacity of citizens to hold public institutions accountable. We do work such as investigative reporting, civil rights litigation, and curating public information. One relevant and notable project is the Citizens Police Data Project, a database of over 56,000 allegations of police misconduct. The information was gathered by the Invisible Institute through a series of FOIA requests, curated and cleaned to make it easily understandable, and made available to the public.

Additional non-affiliated volunteers including students, developers, civic hackers, and other interested people worked on this repository. A group at the weekly Chi Hack Night civic tech meetup worked on this.

How can I get involved?

First, you are welcome to download this data and do anything with it. This is a resource intended to be available to the public.

If you are interested in contributing to this repository, there are several ways you can help:

• Contribute on GitHub. It's an awesome service that lets us build this repository with completely open source. Visit our issue tracker to see what needs to be done and what people are working on.
• Come to Chi Hack Night, every Tuesday night at Merchandise Mart. We frequently meet up to discuss the project and volunteers connect with Invisible Institute folks. If we're not meeting on a given week, you can still check out other exciting civic tech projects that the Chicago community is building.
• Slack. Slack lets us collaborate remotely via a powerful chat interface. Join us!

In-depth topics

• Useful Terminology
• Background
• IPRA process for police complaints