Request 005 — 1/5/2026

North, northeast, south, east and west, and then a couple more. We’re looking at Illinois college police budgets.

Happy Monday! It’s foiaday!

A big welcome to all of the weekly subscribers — this is your first foiaday dispatch! It’s been wild seeing the amount of support and number of subscribers tick up as the past few days have gone by; thank you everyone for your interest in this silly little project. 

This is our official week one update: it’s the fifth day of the year, and I’ve requested five documents so far, and I’ve yet to get anything back.

Well, more than five documents. I’ll go in full detail of what I’ve requested so far in a little bit, but all-in, I’ve made 11 requests, and today, I made nine more.

If there's a coworker or friend you think would benefit from this newsletter, feel free to forward it to them! If they subscribe, they'll also get a link to a template for the tracker I like to use to keep tabs on requests I've filed.

Today’s request — college police budgets and expenditures — follows the trend of the past few days: one type of document to multiple places. While I’m not trying to make a habit of this, it just seemed fitting for this request. I didn’t want to leave anyone out! And who can really pick their favorite Illinois public 4-year university? (It’s NEIU. Come on! El Centro??? Gorgeous.)

Illinois has a lot of colleges and universities. But many of them are private — like University of Chicago, Northwestern, Knox, IIT, Columbia, SAIC, Roosevelt, Loyola, DePaul — which means very limited access to records by way of FOIA. 

It’s still possible, and that’s something I have queued up for later this year. But private university police forces are historically very opaque about what records they have on hand and what they’ll release, even if they’re, for example, the largest private police force in the country and have full authority to make arrests, detain suspects and, yes, create a lot of paperwork.

It’s just secret paperwork. Semi-secret, quasi-governmental, sort of paramilitary, inaccessible paperwork. You know how it goes.

So let’s limit our scope for now. Illinois has nine public, 4-year universities and university systems: the Southern Illinois University system, which includes Carbondale (go Salukis!) and Edwardsville, Western Illinois University, Eastern Illinois University, (aforementioned) Northeastern Illinois University, Northern Illinois University, Governors State University, Chicago State University, Illinois State University, and the University of Illinois system, which includes the University of Illinois Chicago, Springfield and Urbana Champaign. 

Alrighty. That’s nine requests, because the FOIAs will all go to the same place for Carbondale and Edwardsville, plus Chicago/Springfield/UIUC. Nice!Because they’re nested within universities and ergo state/federally funded, most of the requests should be straightforward. Illinois does have legislation on the books that protects university police from FOIA disclosure, but that’s only applicable to private university police forces. It’s good to know, though, in case someone cries foul.

Why do I want this? I dunno! Why do we want anything? I’m particularly chomping at the bit to create something similar to John Clary’s Run The Data project, which I think is a really sharp and cool way to break down Austin Police Department expenditures. (Including the “Huh?” section at the bottom.)

(By the way, if you’re an editor, and you’re reading this thinking, “Huh, I would love for that to be something my readers could learn more about,” well, do I have the freelance or full-time reporter for you.)

But on the news front, budgets and expenditures are interesting. Security and public safety play a massive role on college campuses, and in Illinois, there’s a massive variety in college campus life and the ways that different police forces intersect.

Case in point: in 2016, the Cook County Chronicle reported that Morton College employed 30 — yes, 3-0 — staff in its public safety division, including 23 full or part time officers and 8 dispatchers. It spent over $750,000 on its security force in 2012, which is about $1.06 million today. 

Morton College, dear readers, is one of the smallest community colleges in Illinois, nested just outside of Chicago. It had about 5,000 students in 2016. That’s a crazy ratio of officers to students. (And means approximately $150-in-2016-money a head for security costs, just looking at students.)

So. Let’s request some financial details, and then some, about the state’s largest universities. Here’s the language I used for my request, which also includes a variety of details to help put budget and expenses into context:

The following documents for most recent year (fiscal or school year) data is available:

- Payroll information for the university’s police or public safety force, including details like full or part time status, base salary, bonuses, other benefits received and date of hire. Please provide this in a .xlsx, .csv or other machine-readable format suitable for a program like Excel.

- Budget information for the university’s police or public safety force, including allocated line items for different categories like payroll, equipment, maintenance, operations, and miscellaneous expenses. Please provide this in a .pdf, .xlsx or .csv format, if possible.

- A spreadsheet of expenditures for the university’s police or public safety force, including reimbursement requests and expenses incurred, from 1/1/2024 until present (1/5/2026). Please include line-item data with the cost of the item or expense, a cost or budget code, a description of the item or expense and the date of expense, with personally identifiable information redacted if necessary. Please provide this in a .csv or .xlsx if possible. 

My goal is to upload all returned documents up into DocumentCloud so they can be publicly accessible once the records are released. If you’re a student journalist at one of these schools, or you know someone who is, feel free to put me in touch with them. I’d love to hook them up with the records once I get them back!

In the meantime, as promised, here's a list of the requests I’ve put in so far for the past week. If you’re curious, you can click the slug name in order to read the corresponding foiaday issue and the request language in the archives:

_{*a slug is a journalism term for a nickname or shorthand to describe something like a story}

If you have any ideas for requests, feedback, or thoughts about foiaday, we now have a form! Feel free to pop by to share inspiration to help get me through this year’s worth of requests.

Otherwise, if you have any questions, comments, love letters or conspiracy theories, you can always drop me a line by replying to this email.

I’ve got a fun week of requests ahead of me, and don’t worry, I am dialing it down a bit in volume. For now. This project is a marathon, not a sprint.

Weekly subscribers, you’ll see me in your inbox next Monday, and all the Mondays to come, with a summary of how this week goes, on both the requesting and the returns fronts. Daily subscribers, I’ll see you tomorrow! 

Happy filing, and have a good week!

Cam