Thread by @nomadj1s

A few days ago, the University of Chicago, i.e. the president and provost, emailed the campus with a subject mentioning “public safety”

The email starts out by calling for an “examination and reflection of law enforcement in our society”

🧵 👇🏾

One thing the email said was that the University is taking steps toward transparency.

What caught my eye: hyperlinks to publicly available data on all traffic stops and “field interviews” (e.g. questioning or searching people) done by University of Chicago Police (UCPD)

To their credit, there are searchable databases going back to maybe 2015 that show every traffic stop and search

So I figured out how to scrape data from a website using Python

https://twitter.com/nomadj1s/status/1293670707000418304

Now, for context, the UCPD is one of the largest private security forces in the US. They are not a part of Chicago PD. They preside over UChicago, neighboring blocks, and also in other neighborhoods where there are UChicago Charter Schools

Here is a brief history of the police force in the Maroon, our student newspaper. Their origins are related to urban renewal efforts (❗️) and the founding of UChicago charter schools

chicagomaroon.com/2012/05/25/a-b…

More context: the racial makeup of the Univerisity’s student body is hard to find on our website, but this is from the registrar for Spring 2020

White: 39.2%
Asian: 14.0%
Hispanic/Latino: 10.2%
Black: 4.8%
Intl: 25.1% (not broken out by race)

registrar.uchicago.edu/data-reporting/

UChicago is located in Hyde Park, which has the following demographic breakdown:

White: 47.6%
Black: 26.8%
Asian: 12.1%
Hispanic/Latino/a/x: 8.5%
Other: 5.0%

cmap.illinois.gov/documents/1018…

The data on UCPD traffic stops captures race and gender. Now that you know the context, what share of traffic stops do you think are black?

Similarly, what share of “field interviews,” or contact between UCPD and individuals within UCPD’s patrol area, are Black people?

I scraped the UCPD data from 6/1/2015 to the present.

Here is the breakdown by race for traffic stops

Black people are about 73%

And here is the breakdown by race for non-traffic interactions between UCPD and individuals from 6/2015 to present

Black people are 94%

If you add gender, black and male make up 46% of traffic stops, and black and female makes up 27%

Black and male are 85% of non-traffic interaction and black and female are 7%

So, black people are 5% of the UChicago student body, 27% of Hyde Park, but are 73% of traffic stops and 94% of non-traffic stops by UCPD

Other neigboring communities within UCPD’s jurisdiction have higher shares of black people, so we can probably conclude, especially with non-traffic stops, that UCPD is primarily stopping black people not affiliated with the university

One has to wonder, how the UCPD so reliably doesn’t stop students 🤔

There’s also qualitative data:

1. Many UCPD interactions are because someone calls the police on a “suspicious” black person

2. A majority of cases result in no charges, but many involve searches & interrogation

Can’t stress enough: #2 is not the positive you may think it is

Black people in surrounding communities, and within, will tell you they don’t feel welcomed on UChicago’s campus, and UPCD plays a major role in that ...

There is a student-led movement at Uchicago to disband the UCPD, @care_not_cops, that has previously mentioned this data in a Chicago Maroon op ed:

chicagomaroon.com/article/2020/6…

There’s also a recent letter by faculty affiliated with the UChicago Center for the Study of Race, Politics, & Culture (CSRPC) that among other things raises concerns about Univerity Policing

(full disclosure, I’m a signatory)

bitly.com/DiversityStrike

Here are links to the UCPD searchable databases:

incidentreports.uchicago.edu/fieldInterview…

incidentreports.uchicago.edu/trafficStopsAr…

Here’s a GitHub repo with the data I scraped and the Python code I used to do my calculations:

github.com/nomadj1s/UCPDd…

And here’s a link to an interactive Jupyter notebook with same code:

mybinder.org/v2/gh/nomadj1s…

the end ...

More analysis using this data:

https://twitter.com/erhlango/status/1294446420808916994?s=21

https://twitter.com/erhlango/status/1294446420808916994

Since people are asking, these are the demographics of the UCPD, as reported by UChicago

These numbers, to me, however, are mostly irrelevant for thinking about the structural and institutional issues above