Finding records of city officials

January 16, 2012 12:02 PM

Do you know of any resources that would help me find out about city officials--specifically mayors and chiefs of police--in major cities in the U.S.?

I'm doing a research project about city governments and policing (not for a class, just in case you're worried about that) and I need to find a way to figure out who mayors and chiefs of police are in major cities in the U.S. from about 1970 to the 2000s. Do you know of a place where this information might be centrally available, or am I going to have to search city by city? Here are some of the cities that I'm looking for:

New York City
Indianapolis
Minneapolis
Newark
Houston
Jersey City
Kansas City
Los Angeles
Omaha, NE
Philadelphia
St. Louis
Charlotte, NC
Chicago
Lowell
Oakland
Phoenix
San Diego

I haven't had a lot of luck googling for a central repository where this information might be located, but I'm hoping someone out there might be aware of resources at the city, state, but ideally at the national level.

posted by _cave to Law & Government (9 answers total)

US conference of Mayors
International Conference of Chiefs of Police
posted by Ideefixe at 12:16 PM on January 16, 2012

Getting the information from those cities' websites would probably take about fifteen minutes. Contacting and obtaining the information from any central repository would likely take at least that long.

The two links above are actually fairly unlikely to be of help, as they're actually industry/trade groups, and those groups are pretty reluctant to hand out membership lists or member information.

Just look it up.
posted by valkyryn at 12:39 PM on January 16, 2012

The OP wants historical information, which the city websites are unlikely to have.
posted by desjardins at 12:43 PM on January 16, 2012

Wikipedia has historical lists of mayors for probably every one of those cities. E.g. here's the one for Omaha.
posted by parudox at 12:56 PM on January 16, 2012 [1 favorite]

Wikipedia is your friend here. If you know the current mayor, the entry for that mayor will often link to chronological lists for the office (see NYC for example).

On preview, damn you, parudox! I was doublechecking smaller towns. Lowell MA doesn't have a relevant wikipedia entry, but I still think they'll have most of them.
posted by postel's law at 12:59 PM on January 16, 2012

Response by poster: Right, the information is easy to find for the current mayor and chief of police, but much more difficult to find for past mayors and chiefs, especially when you go back to the 1970s and 1980s. That's really the issue that I'm running into. Professional associations, etc. don't seem to have this information on their websites.

I didn't even think to check Wikipedia (because grad school taught me that Wikipedia is evil), so that's very useful.
posted by _cave at 3:19 PM on January 16, 2012

I had a classmate on a group project in grad school that the rest of us had to turn in for copying Wikipedia (and other websites) wholesale in order to protect our own grades. That said, I always tell students or others to start there (but never end there). At the very least it gives you a sense of your topic, and you might even find suggestions for sources in the references.
posted by postel's law at 4:38 PM on January 16, 2012

FYI, if this is at all time sensitive do your research today, because Wikipedia is going black tomorrow to protest SOPA/PIPA.
posted by postel's law at 10:57 AM on January 17, 2012

Response by poster: I have a few weeks yet so it's not that urgent. I'll update this if I find some awesome, publicly available, annual, national census of city officials in the U.S. I was really hoping that something like that existed.
posted by _cave at 12:35 PM on January 17, 2012