Chicago police decommission the Strategic Subject List after $3.8 million and ten years

The Chicago Police Department decommissioned its ‘party to violence’ risk-model program — the Strategic Subject List and its successor, the Crime and Victimization Risk Model — on November 1, 2019, after telling the Office of Inspector General in August 2019 it intended to do so. On January 23, 2020 the OIG published an advisory reporting that CPD had received $3.8 million in federal grants and spent ten years developing the sequential models, which assigned scores predicting the likelihood a person would be the victim or offender in a shooting. The advisory’s areas of concern included the unreliability of risk scores and tiers, improperly trained sworn personnel, a lack of controls on internal and external access, and interventions that may have attached negative consequences to arrests that never produced convictions. The algorithm was built by the Illinois Institute of Technology under a Department of Justice Bureau of Justice Assistance grant. The databases held data on more than 300,000 people.