Cohort 2025
Invisible Institute
Using Machine Learning for Police Accountability in Gender-Based Violence Cases
Chicago, IL
Since 2019, the Chicago Police Department (CPD) has been under a court-ordered reform process known as a consent decree. This consent decree was ordered in response to a US Department of Justice investigation that found unconstitutional use of force on the part of the CPD, particularly in Black and Latinx communities. Resident complaints around police behavior were one source that informed this finding.
In 2021, Invisible Institute, a nonprofit journalism production company in Chicago’s South Side, released Beneath the Surface, a data science project investigating police responses to sexual assault and mistreatment of survivors. Most analyses of police complaints use official categories, such as “excessive force” or “improper search”; Beneath the Surface trained community data taggers to analyze and categorize police complaints in ways that would shed light on experiences of survivors that are not captured in such official categories. Invisible Institute then trained a machine learning model on the work of these community data taggers, and the findings informed a 2024 Pulitzer Prize–winning investigation into the CPD’s mishandling of missing person cases.
With Catalyst grant funding, the Invisible Institute will partner with the Human Rights Data Analysis Group to update the machine learning model behind Beneath the Surface. The original model, trained using a sample of 30,000 complaint files from 2011 to 2015, will be enhanced by a further 11,000 complaints from 2000 to 2007 and more recent complaint files from 2017 to 2023. Community data taggers will analyze police complaints to refine the model to recognize police responses to gender-based violence, especially in Chicago’s Black and Latinx communities. Findings from the updated model will be further supplemented by interviews with residents to understand how gender-based violence affects Chicago communities and the ways in which police respond. Given that the CPD is amid court-ordered reform, updating the machine learning model through community engagement will help document and assess how ongoing reforms are impacting communities most vulnerable to police abuse.
Invisible Institute was also a Catalyst grantee in 2022. Read about its 2022 project, Open Data Expansion in Champaign and Urbana, Illinois.
