Oversight commission shuts down Chicago Police gang database
CHICAGO (CBS) -- Police claimed a database of Chicago gang members helped make the city safer – but it was so poorly maintained, and riddled with so many mistakes, that the committee that oversees the CPD is shutting it down.
As CBS 2's Chris Tye reported Thursday, the idea of a gang database makes sense to many – with the idea being to track bad actors to keep the public safe.
But twice over the last five years, the city's Inspector General laid into the CPD for its out-of-date database that contained jaw-dropping mistakes amid allegations that it was deeply discriminatory.
Over the years, 134,242 people entered the CPD gang database through any number of entry points. Of the people entered, 95 percent were Black or Latinx.
A total of 90 people were listed as over 117 years old or older, and some listed were as young as 7.
"I viewed it as a very racist and discriminatory tool," said Anthony Driver Jr., president of the Community Commission for Public Safety and Accountability. "It was one that was only about 3 percent accurate."
The Community Commission for Public Safety and Accountability oversees public safety – and has the authority to scrap the database. It did so Thursday night.
Driver said being wrongly entered into the database - as his father was - can change lives for the worse.
"A lot of the folks on it were denied their Second Amendment rights to bear arms," Driver said. "They were denied employment with many different city agencies."
Routine traffic stops also often take on a whole new tone for anyone in the database.
The mistakes ran even deeper. According to a report in 2019 by the Chicago Inspector General, the CPD failed to notify those who were entered in the database.
OIG CPD Gang Database Review by Todd Feurer on Scribd
"We saw occupations listed as for people that were clearly offensive - people listed as 'losers' as occupation, and worse than that," said Chicago Inspector General Deborah Witzburg .
The Inspector General also said in 2019 that there was no process to contest or appeal being in the database, and there was no way to purge "faulty designations."
"Our findings were really troubling," said Witzburg. "That's why we undertook this effort."
The Inspector General's office took the CPD to task twice - once in 2019 with its initial findings, and then again in 2021 for failing to improve.
"There was nobody fact-checking and scraping and scrubbing the database to check for accuracy," said Driver. "It's Chicago. We have a very tough history that we've got to deal with. A lot of things like that has happened in our past, and we're trying to right these wrongs."
To right the wrongs in this case, Driver said, the solution is to get rid of the gang database.
There is no plan right now to replace the database, which is set to go offline any day.
"We did not recommend that CPD stop collecting or using gang affiliation information," Witzburg said. "What we recommended, boiled down to the fact if the Police Department were to continue to collect and use this information, have to must do it in a more responsible way."
The Community Commission for Public Safety and Accountability had to fight with the CPD tooth and nail to keep the gang database within their purview to be able to shut it down.
The CPD would need the commission's approval to create a new database.
The commission also has input on the new police superintendent, Larry Snelling, who met the public at an event Thursday night in Pilsen. A meeting slated for Friday where his approval could have been voted on has been delayed.