
Chicago Police Department shuts down its arrest API - blinding-streak
https://www.chicagoreporter.com/chicago-police-department-arrest-api-shutdown-is-its-own-kind-of-cover-up/
======
save_ferris
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)

~~~
heavyset_go
> _It 's crazy to me that in 2020, there isn't comprehensive, mandatory
> Federal tracking of police-involved shootings._

There is a billion dollar lobby that goes up to bat whenever law enforcement
gets bad press, or legislation they don't like gets proposed.

While I'm in favor of unionization, I do not support organizations that
represent the strong arm of the state's desire to operate opaquely and without
oversight from the people they're policing.

~~~
nostromo
It's confusing for me that so many people will complain about how the police
unions prevent reform and allow for bad behavior -- but then support unions
for all other public sector workers.

~~~
falcrist
Public sector unions seem a little odd to me. The whole point of unions is to
have collective bargaining power to deal with the bargaining power of
corporations. That makes perfect sense... but isn't collective bargaining the
point of having a democratic government?

I'm not saying having, say, a teachers' union is a bad thing. I just feel like
it should be redundant.

Of course, the police are a special case even within the realm of public
sector unions, because they're the ones enforcing the law anyway. It's one
step removed from having a union of congresspeople, which really WOULD be
completely redundant. What are they going to do? Petition themselves?

~~~
fredophile
Collective bargaining evens out the power imbalances between workers and their
employers. It doesn't really matter if the employer is the government or a
private company. I'm not sure what point you're trying to make about
collective bargaining and democracy since the two are unrelated.

There are other ways to handle public sector unions. For example, in Canada
the military is not part of a union but their pay is tied to other public
sector employees who are unionized. This makes sense since you don't want the
military going on strike. When the union employees go on strike to get better
pay and benefits the military also gets the same increases. You could do
something similar in the US by tying police salaries and benefits to another
public sector group like teachers or nurses. I have the feeling that this
would be extremely unpopular with the police.

~~~
falcrist
> Collective bargaining evens out the power imbalances between workers and
> their employers.

The reason it's strange is because if the government is a democracy
(representative or direct), there should already be a mechanism for collective
bargaining.

The fact that this is often insufficient strikes me as a pretty strong
indictment of our systems of government.

~~~
fredophile
I believe your argument is that in a democracy, public sector employees can
vote for politicians who will represent their interests and this is equivalent
to collective bargaining. Please let me know if I've misunderstood you because
I don't want to argue against a straw man.

Let's consider teachers as an example. The top search result in Google tells
me that 2% of the population of the US are teachers. With collective
bargaining they can do work to rule, go on strike, and other job actions to
pressure the government to improve working conditions. With voting they don't
have a large enough voting block to push through candidates that will improve
their working conditions. They would somehow need to convince over 48% of the
population, assuming no gerrymandering, to also vote for the candidate that
they want. That seems like a big thing to ask just to ensure an annual cost of
living increase.

~~~
falcrist
It's not just direct voting. There are plenty of other ways to influence
culture to sway other voters.

And given the limited number of candidates and the frequency with which our
elections come down to a few percent, they certainly wouldn't have to sway 48%
of the population to influence how elected representatives treat them.

~~~
fredophile
Can you give me an example, other than voting, of how democracy is collective
bargaining?

You're not considering wedge issues? What if the candidate that would improve
your working conditions also has a stance on an issue that you are strongly
opposed to? For example, do you vote for the candidate who will give you a
small raise but also disagrees with you on abortion? What if all of the
candidates feel like siding with you would alienate more people than your
voting bloc would bring?

~~~
falcrist
Can you give me some examples, other than voting, of what constitutes
democracy?

> You're not considering wedge issues?

Maybe our systems of government shouldn't have this weakness. This is what I
was talking about when I mentioned the "strong indictment".

~~~
fredophile
You're the one that wrote, "It's not just direct voting." I'm just asking for
an example other than direct voting. I'm legitimately trying to understand
your point but so far I still don't see the link between democracy and
collective bargaining.

~~~
falcrist
Well I need to know what your definition of "democracy" encompasses.

Examples of things other than direct voting include campaign contributions,
talking to the media, going door to door. In the case of teachers, you could
talk directly to parents during meetings.

There are all kinds of ways to influence elections that go well beyond simply
casting your vote.

------
mthoms
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
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'.

------
tptacek
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.

------
rmason
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.

------
rs23296008n1
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!

------
vinceguidry
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
> 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
If we had a million NASAs all over the country, they wouldn't all be paragons
of professionalism.

------
alexilliamson
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.

------
fzeroracer
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.

------
MisterBastahrd
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."

------
yummypaint
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
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
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
RIP [https://heyjackass.com/](https://heyjackass.com/)

------
lokar
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
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
Yeah, but most politicians at least pretend.

------
jb775
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.

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

~~~
mattbit
“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.”

------
unethical_ban
Actual, unmodified title as of Thu Jul 9 1609 CDT:

Chicago Police Department arrest API shutdown is its own kind of ‘cover up’

------
BLKNSLVR
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)

------
ryantuck
Wonder if they shut down their asSOAP API as well

------
aahhahahaaa
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.

~~~
twsttest
>"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
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.

