Our third annual FOIA campaign is getting underway with a target of the Cook County Sheriff’s Office. The Sheriff’s Office is responsible for administration and staffing of the Cook County Jail and the Cook County Sheriff’s Police as well as guarding the courts throughout Cook County. There is far too little scrutiny into the activities of the office. Currently far too little data is available for the public to access to be able to reliably use the data to judge the activities of the Sheriff’s Office. Our FOIA campaign is designed to either use the freedom of information act to access systemic data that empowers communities or use litigation to open the data.

Here is a link to the first FOIA we filed:  FOIA #1

There is a lot of work that needs to be done to open the activities of this office to the public. CJP has always stood by a motto that the public always needs to see beyond the data the public body willingly makes available because of the strong incentive for public bodies to use their “transparency” actually as a weapon to hide their activities. CJP is dedicated to not allowing this to occur. The Sheriff’s Office fulfills many roles in Chicago and Cook County’s justice system as it;

• Runs the Cook County Jail – one of the largest single site jails in the US.
• Maintains a police force that mostly patrols unincorporated areas of the suburbs.
• They also guard the courthouses and courtrooms.