CPD's Operation Flummox

The Federal Bureau of Investigation has released its “Preliminary Annual Uniform Crime Report” for 2006. It is easily available at the FBI’s web site. The site is generally easy to navigate and information is relatively easy to find and access. What a contrast the FBI site is to the web site of the Chicago Police Department. The CPD’s site is confusing, slow, and seems designed to make it as difficult as possible for the average citizen to access information. Go to the Chicago Police Department’s web site and you will find that the CPD makes you jump through hoops to get information, and they put all kinds of bizarre conditions and requirements in front of requestors of information. For example, if you want to request statistical data from the Chicago Police Department, you are directed to a Login page where you must enter your User ID and a Password. The CPD, apparently, considers this information to be semi-secret. They really don’t want you to have it, but by law they must provide it. They just don’t want to make it easy for you. The CPD has a weird document called “Guidelines Relating to Statistical and Crime Data Requests Received From Academic Researchers, Community Organizations, and the General Public.” Cleverly, the CPD put this document into a secure PDF that does not allow text copying. The document expands upon the requirements for getting statistics. In typical government bureaucratese, the document's title is longer than it needs to be. "Guidelines Relating to Statistical and Crime Data Requests" would have sufficed. RPB figured out how to get around the text copying problem. Here’s how you can do it. Save a copy of the PDF, then print it “to file,” which saves it in Microsoft Office Document Imaging format. From that new document, optical character recognition (OCR) will allow saving as a Word document. So much for CPD’s “secure” PDF. Chumps. Ironically, CPD justifies the request form with this statement: “Due to the volume of requests for statistical information and the scarcity of resources within the Department to handle these requests, other specialized requests for information can only be reviewed and approved consistent with the guidelines set forth below.” It is ironic because the “volume of requests” would be far easier to handle if the information was placed on the web site and accessible without the formal, written request. In other words, the request form only increases the CPD’s work load. But the true purpose form has nothing to do with work load. Rather, it is a deliberately placed obstacle designed to discourage people from gaining access to this information. The actual request form is “Statistical Data Request Form” CPD-15.146 (12/03). It is a secure PDF form that asks you to describe your “intended use of the data.” That’s bad enough, but it gets worse. In the “Work Product/Publication Section” of the request form, you are asked to “identify anticipated title of publication produced, or if no title describe nature of product.” Why? The form asks you to agree “specifically agree to provide the Chicago Police Department, Research& Development Division a copy of any final product produced based upon data received from this request.” In other words, this is a contract and you better have damned good reason for asking for this information, and if you publish it you better provide CPD with a copy of it. You are required to sign the form, meaning you have signed a contract and have agreed to those conditions. You would technically be violating a contract if you fail to, say, provide CPD with a copy of that community newsletter that used an information you gained through your request. This is clear and open government? Why does the CPD make us jump hurdles to get information that should be readily available and easily accessed? One can only guess. Remember, Chicago also requires members of the press to have “credentials” in order to access many events. The City Council of Daley’s Kingdom really, really does not like openness. They do not truly want to be forthcoming. Oh, they pretend to be. But things like the press credentials requirement and the difficulties imposed on the public in order to access police statistics are just two of many, many obstacles deliberately put in place to flummox you and me. Flummoxed we are.