Keep Factually independent
Whether you agree or disagree with our analysis, these conversations matter for democracy. We don't take money from political groups - even a $5 donation helps us keep it that way.
How does the Chicago Police Department define and categorize shootings, domestic violence, and sexual assault for its crime reports?
Executive summary
The Chicago Police Department (CPD) publishes crime incident data drawn from its CLEAR system and summarizes topics such as domestic violence in its annual reports; the public “Crimes” dataset is described as reported incidents extracted from CLEAR and carries a disclaimer that preliminary classifications may change with investigation [1]. CPD tools for public access include CLEARMAP and the City data portal (Crimes — Map; Crimes 2001–Present), and CPD annual reports include summary tables for domestic violence and other categories [2] [3] [4].
1. How CPD’s public datasets are framed: “reported incidents” from CLEAR
CPD’s publicly available crime files are explicitly constructed from the CLEAR (Citizen Law Enforcement Analysis and Reporting) system and represent “reported incidents of crime” during specific time windows; the City data portal notes the dataset reflects reported incidents over the past year (minus the most recent seven days) and the “Crimes” description repeats that the data are extracted from CPD’s CLEAR system [1] [3]. That emphasis on “reported” matters: the dataset is not a final adjudication record but a live operational feed that CPD and the City warn can change after follow-up investigation [1].
2. CPD’s caution: preliminary classifications and time limits
CPD’s public dataset carries an explicit disclaimer that the crime entries are based on preliminary information from reporting parties and “may be changed at a later date based upon additional investigation”; the department warns of potential mechanical or human error and notes crimes not reported within 97 days may be excluded [1]. Users are told the department “does not guarantee the accuracy, completeness, timeliness, or correct sequencing” of the data and that visual map approximations should be treated cautiously [1].
3. Where CPD publishes category-level summaries (including domestic violence)
Beyond incident-level feeds, CPD’s Annual Reports include summary data on index, violent and property crimes and explicitly list domestic violence among the topics covered — meaning CPD produces aggregated statistics and summaries for domestic violence in its formal reporting [4]. The city’s Police Reports and Police Services pages link to CLEARMAP and other public tools intended for searching crime by address, district, beat, or community area [5] [6].
4. How shootings and violent crimes appear in the data (operational, not legal)
When the public queries “shootings” or other violent incidents in CLEARMAP or the City data portal, what appears are incident records logged in CLEAR — operational labels used by responding officers or intake staff. The datasets underpinning public dashboards are incident-centered and used for transparency and analysis (CLEARMAP aims to provide transparency and easier access) but are not legal determinations of guilt or final prosecutorial classifications [2] [1].
5. Sexual assault and domestic violence: reporting path vs. dataset labels
Available CPD materials in the search results show CPD includes domestic violence as a named summary topic in annual reporting [4] and includes incident-level entries in CLEAR that power CLEARMAP and the City’s crimes datasets [1] [2]. However, the search results do not provide a CPD-authored glossary or statute-level definitions in these pages that spell out the exact threshold or code used to classify an incident as “domestic violence” or “sexual assault” in CLEAR; therefore, available sources do not mention CPD’s precise internal coding definitions or the exact offense codes used for sexual assault vs. non-sexual violent offenses in these public pages [1] [4] [2].
6. Practical implications and limitations for researchers and the public
Because CPD’s public crime datasets are preliminary incident records drawn from CLEAR and may be revised, researchers and residents should treat counts as operational snapshots, not final judicial outcomes [1]. The City data portal and CLEARMAP facilitate neighborhood-level queries but carry the department’s caveat about exclusions (e.g., 97-day reporting window) and potential errors [1] [2] [3]. CPD’s annual reports provide aggregated statistics (including domestic violence), but the sources here do not supply the line-by-line classification rules for researchers who need coding-level precision [4].
7. Where to look next for formal definitions and coding rules
For the precise legal or internal CLEAR codes that determine whether an incident is recorded as a shooting, domestic violence, or sexual assault, CPD’s CLEAR documentation, the full CLEARMAP documentation, or internal policy manuals would be the next primary sources; the public pages linked from CPD and the City data portal point to those systems but do not reproduce the codebook in the materials surfaced in this search [2] [5] [3]. If you need exact offense-code definitions or the procedural rulebook CPD uses to recategorize incidents after investigation, request CPD’s CLEAR/CLEARMAP documentation or the department’s data dictionary via the Police Department’s records request channels referenced on CPD’s Police Services pages [6] [5].
Limitations: This analysis is based only on the City and CPD pages and portal descriptions returned in the current search; those pages confirm the data source (CLEAR), public tools (CLEARMAP, data portal), and aggregate reporting (annual reports) but do not include a public CPD codebook or verbatim definitions for each category in the materials retrieved here [1] [2] [4].