COPA Cases: Chicago Police Complaint Summaries with Demographics

Complaints received by the Civilian Office of Police Accountability and its predecessor agency. Each row represents a single complaint, with multi-person data delimited by pipes. The dataset includes columns for complaint categories, demographics of complainants and involved officers, beat locations, and case status.

Use Cases

• Analyzing complaint trends over time using COMPLAINT_DATE, COMPLAINT_HOUR, and COMPLAINT_MONTH.
• Investigating demographic disparities using RACE_OF_COMPLAINANTS, AGE_OF_COMPLAINANTS, SEX_OF_COMPLAINANTS, and corresponding officer columns.
• Modeling case outcomes or status using CURRENT_CATEGORY, FINDING_CODE, and CURRENT_STATUS.
• Mapping complaint density by police jurisdiction using BEAT and ASSIGNMENT columns.

Strengths

• Structured multi-person data with consistent ordering across columns, indicated by pipe delimiters.
• Includes detailed temporal (COMPLAINT_DATE, HOUR) and demographic (RACE, AGE, SEX) columns for both complainants and officers.
• Hosted on the authoritative data.cityofchicago.org domain.

Limitations

• Row count is unknown, which may limit suitability assessment.
• Information on investigations conducted by the Bureau of Internal Affairs is excluded, as noted in the description.
• Last updated 2026-04-01 07:29:15; freshness should be verified.

Provenance

Source

data.cityofchicago.org

Collection Method

Complaints logged by the Civilian Office of Police Accountability (COPA) and its predecessor agency.

Time Range

null

Freshness

Last updated 2026-04-01 07:29:15.

Geography

Chicago, Illinois, USA (implied by BEAT column and source organization).