Chicago Police Department

Retrospective on David Brown

Featured

Mayor Lightfoot Loss

Featured

A Little Bit of Time in Jail

THE PROBLEM AND OUR SOLUTION

A justice system that is transparent and evidence-based leads to better outcomes for all. We’re striving to force transparency in the City of Chicago and Cook County in order to create safer and better-informed communities.

We empower 

Chicagoans to create 

safer communities 

through government 

transparency.

The Problem: The Chicago & Cook County justice system is the 2nd largest in the United States, spanning across both city and county government with budgets totaling in the billions of dollars each year. Tens of thousands of city and county residents come into contact with the system every year. Despite the vital position this system holds in our lives, the ability of stakeholders, policymakers, and communities to understand and validate the practices of our justice agencies is limited by restrictive policies on the access to data these agencies create.

Our Solution: The Chicago Justice Project focuses exclusively on opening big data from across the Chicago & Cook County justice system using our systemic approach to transparency. We believe that connecting data across agency and political boundaries will greatly increase what we can learn about how our justice system operates, and in turn heighten our ability to use the data to educate and empower stakeholders, communities, and policymakers to engage the justice system. We believe a justice system that implements best practices from around the country and evidence-based decision making will serve their communities the best.

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The Latest News

Brown

Retrospective on David Brown

This week we take the first of what will be many looks at soon to be former Chicago Police Department Superintendent David Brown and his time in Chicago. Unfortunately for Chicago despite the Mayor’s glowing endorsement and hiring of Brown the reality is that the Lightfoot administration was engaged in

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Mayor

Mayor Lightfoot Loss

Mayor Lightfoot just lost re-election and now stands as the first mayor in forty years to fail to lose re-election after their first term in office. Her is our quick reaction to her loss. There is little doubt that the reaction to to Mayor Lightfoot from the beginning was based

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Jail

A Little Bit of Time in Jail

An interesting piece of research documenting in their own words how some practitioners in Illinois’ justice system use jail. While the research on the uses of jail throughout Illinois vary there seems to be a thread that the use is regularly extrajudicial and goes well beyond the legal purposes of

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Chicago Justice Podcast

This is our Chicago Justice Podcast that covers crime, violence, and justice issues in Chicago. We will feature deep dives in to justice system data, interview with researchers and justice system reform advocates, as well as evaluations of justice system practices.