Program Evaluation Summary

              CLEAR offers enhanced police
efficiencies, increased accountability
Vol. 4, No. 3 May 2006
Illinois Criminal Justice Information Authority
Program Evaluation
Summary
The Citizen and Law Enforcement Analysis and
Reporting (CLEAR) project, a state-of-the-art
information technology system enabling Chicago police
to quickly share crime information, promises substantial
crime-fighting benefits, according to a project status
report released in February 2005.
The Chicago Community Policing Evaluation Consor-tium,
a team of researchers from the University of
Illinois at Chicago and Northwestern University, pre-pared
the status report on the Chicago Police Depart-ment
CLEAR project. The project was supported by a
federal Anti-Drug Abuse Act grant administered by the
Authority. The report examined the CLEAR system’s
impact on police management, the department, and
crime-fighting strategies, as well as on the status of the
expanded statewide Illinois Citizen and Law Enforce-ment
Analysis and Reporting system, also know as I-CLEAR.
CLEAR system design and benefits
The Chicago Police Department (CPD) has been devel-oping
CLEAR in partnership with Oracle Corporation
and the Police Executive Research Forum. CLEAR
extracts data stored in CPD’s central data warehouse,
which contains its interrelated applications. The four
key applications are automated incident reporting,
automated arrest, personnel suite (a human resources
component), and e-Track (an evidence collection tool).
Each application underwent a five-step process of
conceptual development, joint application development,
a design/build stage, training, and implementation. By
the end of 2004, all four applications had progressed
significantly toward department-wide use.
Automated incident reporting application
The automated incident reporting application enables
patrol officers to complete case reports at workstations
in any CPD facility. In the future, officers will be able to
use portable data terminals for this purpose. By the end
of 2004, the automated incident reporting application
was operating in several district facilities, but the use of
wireless portable data terminals was limited to one pilot
district. Due to the need to transmit large amounts of
information via complex computer system interactions,
implementation of the wireless portion of this applica-tion
has been more difficult.
By Jessica Ashley
Rod R. Blagojevich, Governor
Sheldon Sorosky, Chairman
Lori G. Levin, Executive Director
120 S. Riverside Plaza, Suite 1016
Chicago, Illinois 60606
Phone: 312-793-8550, TDD: 312-793-4170,
Fax: 312-793-8422
Website: www.icjia.state.il.us
Program Evaluation Summaries are derived from program
evaluations funded or conducted by the Authority. The full
evaluation reports are available from the Authority.
For more information about this or other publications from
the Authority, please contact the Authority’s Criminal
Justice Information Clearinghouse or visit our website.
Printed by authority of the State of Illinois, May 2006.
Illinois Criminal Justice Information Authority