Accountability After Abolition – Report by the Policing Research Group in Chicago

In response to community demands for public accountability and for a responsible process of abolition that provides restitution to people harmed by the database, the Policing in Chicago Research Group at the University of Illinois at Chicago carried out an evaluation of RGID. We analyzed two partial versions of the RGID database (from June 2018 and January 2019), CCSO policies and procedures, data-sharing agreements with hundreds of external agencies, and thousands of pages of internal communications of the CCSO leading up to the decision to decommission the database. These documents were made available through Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests submitted by ProPublica and by the MacArthur Justice Center at Northwestern University.

This report outlines what we know about RGID and the questions that remain.