Records from Palos Heights IL PD were added, covering April through July 2025. Palos Heights is a suburb of roughly 12,000 residents in Cook County, Illinois, about 20 miles southwest of Chicago.
#Organization audit
- Type: Organization audit (Palos Heights PD’s own searches)
- Timespan: Apr 2 – Jul 31, 2025 (~4 months)
- Records: 4,229
- Search types: search: 2,809 (66.4%), lookup: 648 (15.3%), search-Mobile: 413 (9.8%), lookup-Mobile: 359 (8.5%)
No blank reasons. Top entries are free-text investigation strings: Investigation/Inv/inv/investigation combined (~1,983), Narcotics/Narcotic Investigation (~318), Homicide (172), theft (172), Ci (160 — likely “criminal investigation”), hit and run (69). The homicide count is notable for a department of this size.
#Network audit
- Type: Network audit
- Timespan: Apr 1 – Jul 31, 2025 (~4 months)
- Records: 2,599,612
- Organizations: 3,064
#Search types
| Type | Count | % |
|---|---|---|
| search | 1,265,757 | 48.7% |
| lookup | 862,350 | 33.2% |
| search - Mobile | 308,007 | 11.9% |
| lookup - Mobile | 158,106 | 6.1% |
| convoy | 5,263 | 0.20% |
| freeform | 96 | <0.01% |
| multiGeo | 33 | <0.01% |
Vehicle-description searches (48.7%) outpace automated lookups (33.2%), with mobile variants accounting for another 18% — an unusually high mobile proportion compared with many other Illinois agencies.
#Top searchers
| Organization | Searches |
|---|---|
| Houston TX PD | 126,962 |
| Atlanta GA PD | 47,513 |
| Michigan State Police | 39,318 |
| Cleveland OH Division of Police | 38,094 |
| Joliet IL PD | 28,867 |
| Milwaukee WI PD | 27,482 |
| Lexington KY PD | 24,482 |
| Lake County IN SO | 23,058 |
| Chicago IL PD | 22,862 |
| Illinois State Police | 20,934 |
Houston TX PD runs almost 5% of all searches through a suburban Cook County agency. Atlanta GA PD, roughly 700 miles away, is the second-highest external searcher. Chicago IL PD, Palos Heights’ closest large neighbor, ranks ninth.
#Monthly volume
| Month | Records |
|---|---|
| Apr 2025 | 710,591 |
| May 2025 | 781,734 |
| Jun 2025 | 566,904 |
| Jul 2025 | 540,383 |
#Reasons
Reason strings are free-text dominated. Top entries cluster around investigation (inv, Investigation, investigation, Inv, INV, INVESTIGATION, invest — totaling roughly 530,000 records across variants), stolen/Stolen/STOLEN (~131,000), theft (~38,000), warrant (~37,000), and wanted (~22,000). The reason string 99 appears ~19,910 times with no obvious interpretation.
Blank reasons are extremely low at 0.1% (2,612 records).