In recognition of Sunshine Week, Check CU would like to draw attention to some Central Illinois resources that make public records and data more accessible. All of these websites provide public records and data for free, at no cost to the taxpayers:
Illinois Documents (ILDocs.com) provides thousands of records free to access by any person at any time. The site currently covers public bodies in or near Champaign County and resources include:
- Over 15,000 pages of public records, including photos
- A directory of names, positions, photos, and contact information for hundreds of public officials in Central Illinois, searchable and sortable by public body
- Over 7,000 photos of public officials and public places (free to use with credit for any nonprofit purpose)
- Police Department records for Urbana, Champaign, Rantoul, and Danville such as police contracts and policies stretching back over more than 20 years
- A repository of notable Central Illinois lawsuits filed against public bodies, with a focus on police related lawsuits
- A Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) resource page, including a list of dozens of FOIA Officers and their email addresses
- Financial reports for the City of Champaign, City of Urbana, and Champaign County
The Illinois Documents Youtube Channel also hosts hundreds of videos of Urbana and Champaign public meetings. This resource has become especially important for Urbana residents since Urbana meeting videos are no longer viewable on the City’s website.
UrbanaPolice.com provides information about the Urbana Police Department, much of which cannot be found elsewhere. Resources include:
- An automatically updated feed from a variety of news sources that post articles related to the Urbana Police Department
- A full directory showing names, ranks, badge numbers, photos, and contact information for all sworn officers plus non-sworn Police Department staff (extremely useful if you need help identifying a particular police officer)
- A directory of names, positions, photos, and contact information for the members of the Urbana Civilian Police Review Board (CPRB)
- Urbana Police Use of Force logs dating back to 2010
- Information on how to submit a police complaint, including an online form which you can submit anonymously
- A repository of Civilian Police Review Board meeting videos dating back to 2017
- A repository of news articles related to the CPRB dating back until at least 2016, automatically updated
The Invisible Institute has just recently extended their Citizens Police Data Project to the Champaign-Urbana area. Their presentation of police data in the Chicago area, with a mapped and searchable index of nearly a quarter million police complaints, is very impressive. The Champaign-Urbana Police Data Project was just revealed last month, and is still in beta form. Though some data is still being gathered and updated, on their site you can search by police officer name and view the officer’s age, race, rank, hired date, badge number, and salary. You can also see instances of complaints against the officer as well as instances of use of force.
CU-CitizenAccess.org regularly publishes news articles, but they also have a portion of their website devoted to public data, which includes Illinois County Jail Inspection Reports and Inspection Letters. They also have a salary guide for many of the public bodies within Champaign County. The salary guide itself isn’t current to 2022, but CU-CitizenAccess.org has published some articles recently that show salary datasets for 2022 – those can be found by just browsing their recent articles.
Check CU Records is another resource that hosts thousands of pages of records free to access by anyone. Most of the records hosted there were obtained through FOIA requests and they can be sorted by locality or category, and there is also a search tool.