Open Questions and Project Ideas

Here is a collection of open questions and potential project ideas that we are interested in. If you start up a project regarding anything, please open up a ticket in the issue tracker and tag with "independent project". Also please ask someone to put a link here to that issue ticket. We use the issue tracker to help us be organized.

We're always trying to figure out what else we can do! Join the discussion in the issue thread. For inspiration, here is a really cool article by the good people at FiveThirtyEight that uses our data to test the “bad eggs” theory of policing.

Questions that could be answered

• What patterns do we notice in terms of the officers most frequently associated with each category (involved / accused)?
• Do we see any patterns in terms of officer age and rank?
• How are the incidents distributed across the city? (Geocode every incident on a map)
• Do we see different patterns for victims of different races when it comes to initial category vs. current category?
• Do we see different patterns for victims of different races when it comes to change in outcome (“finding code”)?
• Do we see different patterns for victims of different races when it comes to length of investigation?
• What does the data have to say, if anything, about the highest-ranking CPD officers?
• Is there any correlation between the number of shootings and the specific month

Parse IPRA portal documents for officer names and titles

When IPRA released CPD documents on recent incidents involving use of force, they included PDFs that cannot be easily searched. Creating a searchable index of officer names, including ranks and titles at the moment of the incident, will allow for pattern analysis & investigative journalism involving specific officers.

• Read through the IPRA Portal documents and type officer names in the relevant categories on the IPRA Portal Officers spreadsheet.
• We have been parsing each document individually, so there is more than one row per Log number. A single incident will have a single Log number, but a variety of resulting documents (like Arrest Reports and Tactical Response Reports.) An officer may be a “reporting member” in one report, and a “member involved” in another.
• Please include middle initials when available for officer names. Would be helpful to add a sheet with officer names and badge numbers (scraped from the document, not from another source.)

Parse historical documents for category codes

When CPD and IPRA intake and investigate a complaint, and enter that investigation into the database, they code it with a single category. Over time, the category code table has been edited, without historical records to track the changes. In order to check our data, we’d like to build a historical table of category codes & dates. The relationship is a number/letter to a narrative description, for example:

CODE	GROUP	DESCRIPTION	ON / OFF DUTY
06F	Bribery / Official Corruption	RECOMMEND PROFESSIONAL SERVICE	ON

In this example, the Code, Description, and On/Off Duty come from IPRA, and the Group comes from “Group” names from CPD - which we added manually from the sources below.

• 09/2015, we received this FOIA response from CPD, with three versions of a “Complaint Category Table.” May 2014. March 2013. August 1999.
• 10/2015, we received this FOIA response from IPRA, with this IPRA spreadsheet of category codes. It did not include any information about “Groups.” We read the CPD grouping, and using the May 2014 version, grouped the IPRA spreadsheet.
• Here is the working version of the Historical Category Codes to participate. You can find CR documents by searching CPDP.co for “has:document” and opening the complaints. Or, check the
• In order to fill this sheet out, find a CR document, read the narrative summaries, and code the allegations. There will be multiple allegations per CR. Even though the database used by IPRA & CPD only allows for one allegation per CR, we are going to scrape all of the allegations we know of.
• You will have to make a judgement call as to what the category of an allegation is. Do the best you can. There is a list of defined categories. You can switch to the IPRA Codes + CPD Groups sheet to see the Groups and Categories, and especially to see which Group a Category is in.
• If you are unsure about your selection, highlight it! Periodically, a lawyer will review.
• In CPDP Match, you can indicate whether the category you have coded matched the category displayed in the CPDP. * If it’s close, you can add the CPDP category (for example, if you selected OPERATIONS / PERSONNEL - REPORTS and the CPDP displays OPERATIONS / PERSONNEL - FAILURE TO PROVIDE SERVICE), and the complaint is that the officer did not fill out an official report requested by a citizen.
• Please make sure to include the date of the incident. We suspect that when the department queried their dataset, they relied on Codes entered at the time of the incident, and applied contemporaneous definitions.