Daley Admits City Slow On Getting Gun Info To Cops
CHICAGO (WBBM) - Mayor Richard M. Daley admits the city has been slow to give Chicago Police information about when they might be answering a call where residents may have weapons.
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When the U.S. Supreme Court ruled Chicago could not ban the ownership of handguns, the City Council passed an ordinance requiring gun registration and a database. The idea is that, if police are called to a home or apartment, they should be able to tell if anyone there owns weapons.
But, the mayor admits, officers don't have that database yet.
"I'll find out why they didn't do that. Bureaucracy maybe. Maybe it's bureaucracy. I'll ask the superintendent," Daley told reporters.
A spokeswoman for Police Superintendent Jody Weis says the department has been working on a fully automated system to track gun registrations. Records are being entered and, she says, within weeks officers will be able to access the data from their laptops.
Police said in a statement about the gun registration system:
Our primary was focus was the ability to allow residents to register their weapons within the City of Chicago. This process was implemented in a semi-automated way on July 12th 2010 to coincide with the enactment of the ordinance. This included automation of fingerprinting and background checks on registrants via the police database, known as CLEAR.
Immediately thereafter, the Department began working on developing a fully automated application to capture gun registrations. This automated process involved planning, design, prototyping, testing, data integrity validations and document conversion across the Department's enterprise information.
Today, the fully automated application is in production and the Department is in the process of entering records, which will be complete in the coming weeks. At which time, Officers will be able to access that data via CLEAR on their Portable Data Terminals (in-car computers) for improved first-responder safety.
It should be noted that no individuals were ever refused the right to register or obtain a Chicago Firearm Permit and that, even with the temporary process, automated fingerprint-based background checks were conducted and required information was collected for later entry into the fully-automated system.
