Chicago Police Consent Decree Community Survey

Chicago street with commuters in the foreground and buildings and the train in the background

Tracking community perspectives on police reform in Chicago

Client

The Institute for Policy and Civic Engagement at The University of Illinois Chicago, The Independent Monitoring Team
Dates

Round 2: 2024
Round 3: 2026

Problem

Evidence gaps limit understanding of how Chicago residents experience ongoing police reform efforts.

In 2019, the City of Chicago entered into a consent decree with the state of Illinois requiring reforms to the Chicago Police Department (CPD), with a court-appointed Independent Monitoring Team (IMT) charged with assessing the city’s compliance. Successfully implementing these reforms requires understanding how residents—particularly those in communities most affected by policing practices—perceive changes in accountability, transparency, and community relations over time.

The Institute for Policy and Civic Engagement (IPCE) at the University of Illinois Chicago, which conducts the community survey for the IMT, needs reliable data to track how residents’ attitudes and experiences with policing evolve as reform progresses. This evidence informs the IMT’s independent assessment of the city’s compliance under the decree.

Solution

NORC deploys a dual-sample strategy combining probability-based methods with targeted community engagement.

NORC and IPCE use a sampling approach that balances scientific validity with meaningful community representation. For the 2026 general population sample, NORC utilized ChicagoSpeaks, a probability-based panel that represents Chicago households, targeting 1,000+ completed surveys.

Recognizing that young Black males aged 18-25 are a population critically affected by policing but historically difficult to reach through standard surveys, NORC collects a separate oversample targeting 300 additional responses from this group. The team draws from the USPS Delivery Sequence File with oversampling in areas with high density of African American households, then applies NORC’s proprietary big data classifier to identify households most likely to include young Black males.

NORC adapted the survey instrument from previous rounds to maximize comparability to the previous cycles of the survey, and developed culturally appropriate recruitment materials using Dillman’s tailored design method. The push-to-web data collection approach included strategic incentives and multiple contact points designed to maximize response rates while respecting participants’ time.

Result

The survey provides the Independent Monitoring Team reliable data on how Chicago residents perceive and experience their police department.

The project delivers weighted data files for both Chicago’s general population and young Black men, with documentation and a methods memo detailing response rates and data collection metrics. By maintaining survey comparability across multiple rounds, the data enable tracking changes in residents’ attitudes and experiences.

The survey results serve multiple audiences working on police reform in Chicago: the IMT can assess consent decree compliance, city officials can gauge how residents view their efforts, and community organizations can inform their advocacy for continued accountability. The survey also systematically and intentionally brings the perspectives of those most affected by policing—including young Black men, who are often underrepresented in civic data—into the evidence base on residents’ experiences with the CPD.