NCJ Number
211025
Date Published
February 2005
Length
114 pages
Annotation
This is the third evaluation report on the status of the new information technology enterprise system being developed by the Chicago Police Department (CPD).
Abstract
Since 2001, the CPD has been developing a state-of-the-art integrated criminal justice information system called CLEAR (Citizen and Law Enforcement Analysis and Reporting). CLEAR is designed to enhance the city's community policing program by providing any-time, any-place access to repositories of centralized data. In practice, CLEAR is a series of analytic modules that draw on data stored in the CPD's central data warehouse. In early 2004, the Governor of Illinois and the mayor of Chicago announced their commitment to build a single criminal justice database for the State and all of its criminal justice agencies. The new system, called I-CLEAR, will eventually serve all of Illinois through a new partnership between Chicago and the Illinois State Police. This report describes these initiatives, the "launch procedures", and their impact on policing. The ongoing process is evaluated through October 2004. CLEAR has helped district and area managers become familiar with the crime problems in their jurisdictions and has enabled managers at police headquarters to monitor the implementation of plans by employees in the field; however, CLEAR has yet to achieve effective crime analysis that focuses on offending and victimization patterns, environmental correlates of crime, predicted crime trends, and other factors related to thorough crime analysis. Regarding I-CLEAR, the flagship application now under development is a common case-reporting system called I-Case. The long-term goal is to make I-Case available to all law enforcement agencies in Illinois. This report details what led to this development and identifies some of the near-term obstacles to achieving its goals within the promised time frame. 23 figures and 6 tables