Today, the Office of Inspector General’s (OIG) Public Safety Section issued an advisory on the Chicago Police Department’s models known as the Strategic Subject List (SSL) and Crime and Victimization Risk Model (CVRM).
The below statement can be attributed to Karen Sheley, Director, Police Practices Project, ACLU of Illinois.
“We welcome the Office of Inspector General’s update on the use of secret, sophisticated predictive policing databases by the Chicago Police Department. These databases – which captured data on more than 300,000 individuals, disproportionately people of color – have finally been decommissioned. Given the years of public criticism and a study showing them ineffective, CPD never should have used them at all.
This report highlights the need for the CPD to be transparent about the predictive policing tools it is using now. This is critical since the CPD failed to address the recommendations offered by the OIG about data quality, training, and external access to information.
Transparency is critical to the ongoing effort to create faith in policing in Chicago. Unregulated, sophisticated, powerful databases involving hundreds of thousands of names only harm that trust.”
