Know Your Beat: Community Policing in Chicago on 9 January 2015

Having recently moved to Chicago, I constantly have new questions about the city. One of my first wonderings was “Why do police cars here have tags on them and what do those numbers mean?” I’m not just talking about a number on the side but an actually tag that sits in a slot on the roof of many CPD cars and SUVs. Like this:

After speaking with a police officer, I found out they are called ‘beat tags’ and they are an easy way for officers/supervisors around the city to quickly identify what beat a particular vehicle/officer belongs to. The tags can be quickly swapped on and off of vehicles and are more convenient than having to cross reference a car’s number with a registry of who’s driving car #502 that day. In a city with over 12,000 police officers, you can see how an officer might want a quick way to identify what part of a town a car belongs to.

So questioned answered, right? Almost. I then began to want to understand the numbering system that underlies the tags. The answer is actually quite simple: Chicago is broken down in to districts, each district is broken in to sectors, and each sector is broken in to beats. Each beat tag contains all of this information together so by looking at a beat tag you can have a block by block idea of where that car belongs.

There are also variants on these beat tags. A beat might have both an 'A’ and 'B’ car. In addition, there are special units that have unique functions within the beat. The two that were mentioned to me were school units and homelessness:

These beats are all part of the Chicago Alternative Policing Strategy otherwise known as CAPS. If you didn’t know, at the heart of CAPS is the idea that every beat in the city will have a 'beat meeting’ each month where citizens can come and speak with the very people that police their neighborhoods. That’s huge–especially in light of recent issues regarding policing.

So, broad community policing infrastructure: Good. Presentation of information about the city’s beats: In need of some love. I was surprised that the city hasn’t really chosen to present this information in a way that matches the speed of the world today. If you want to look at a map of all the city’s beats the best you’re going to find is this black and white PDF from CPD’s website. Admittedly, the city does have a way to type in your address and find out your beat but you then still have to find your way to the events calendar and find the beat meeting for your particular beat. And kudos to the city for having the shapefiles for the city’s beats available on the Open Data Portal–that said, the data in the most current beat file duplicates every sector as a beat. It should be a 3 for this beat.

As you might have noticed in the photo above, the city’s shapefiles are really just for giving you the facts–forget the fancy stuff…like color. So with all of this in mind, I decided the city could use an interactive map that allows you to explore the city’s beats with visuals that do them justice and with the ability to find out when you next beat meeting is happening. Click the image below to check it out.

Poke around the city long enough and you’ll find that one of the airports has individual beats for each terminal and that sometimes the dead just don’t need to be policed.

Note to self: Avoid Mount Greenwood Cemetery.

After starting this project I also discovered that folks over at Open Gov Hack Night already made a tool that allows you to quickly find your beat and get info on your next beat meeting, very cool stuff. For the time being the links in this map of the city will take you to the CAPSure tool to find out when your specific beat meeting is.

There’s still more to learn about beat tags. Just when I thought I knew everything, I saw this guy below. It was on a cruiser branded with CTA Police so presumably there are unique beats for the CTA.

CAPS is one of the coolest things policing in Chicago has going for it and in light of the past year’s events in NYC and Ferguson why not leverage the hell out of it now? Give some serious thought to going out to your local beat meeting and finding out what’s going on in your community–having now attended one, I promise you that it will be just as funny and dramatic as any show on Netflix and more importantly you can be another voice advocating for change.

Expect more on CAPS in a future post. For now, you can grab the code for this map over on GitHub if you want.