We present an analysis of the Chicago Police Department's (CPD) Strategic Subject List (SSL).
The SSL is a database the CPD developed as a training set for their predictive policing algorithms.
There were 399,000+ people put on this database between 2012 and 2016.
Each person on this database had some interaction with the CPD, and was then assigned a score that
rates their risk of being involved in a violent crime.
When using the designation "likelyhood of being involved in a violent crime", this score alone
does not distinguish between people likely to be victims or perpetraters of violent crimes.
The CPD refuses to release their algorithm that determines this score, and is not transparent
on how they use this score.
The people put on this database were people the CPD were policing, so the algorithm
that determines this score is heavily dependent on who the CPD believes to be criminal;
just because it is a computer assigning this score does not mean it is objective.
We will use this database to bring to light which communities and groups of people CPD are policing.
Explore the different rates at which the CPD puts people on the SSL and the neighborhoods they police. By clicking on a Chicago neighborhood, you can see the overall percentage of people on the SSL in that neighborhood, as well the percentage of people on the SSL for each demographic. We also include general information about the neighborhood.