Too Little, Too Late?
Too little effort from the Chicago Police Department (CPD) is going in to responding to sex crimes in Chicago according to a new report from the Chicago Alliance Against Sexual Exploitation (CAASE). Today we sit down with Madeline Behr, Policy Manager, at CAASE to discuss a report she authored titled “Too Little, Too Late? The […]
Data Brief: Rape Kit Backlog – What We Do and Don’t Know
The first step to solving the rape kit backlog crisis is to understand the actual extent of the problem. Unfortunately, decades of badly-kept records, unclear legislation, and a lack of transparency has made discerning the exact amount of “backlogged” kits in the state of Illinois difficult. In 2015, the Accountability Project, an initiative by the […]
FOIA: CPD VAW Case Statuses
This FOIA request is seeking case statuses on what are traditionally called violence against women (VAW)crimes. These types of cases fall under two categories: domestic violence and sexual assault cases. VAW crimes rarely if ever make the news and when they do they make the it is usually to exploit the crimes for the […]
Felony Sex Crime Case Processing: Report, Analysis, & Recommendations
Examining how the numbers the agencies in Chicago release related to felony sex crime cases are created, what do they really mean, and what is hidden behind those numbers. Criminal justice agencies play a very important role in assisting communities in securing their neighborhoods from crime and violence. The basis for how successful these agencies […]
Lack of Reliable Sexual Assault Numbers
The mere idea that anyone, including the agencies of our criminal justice system, has a real grasp on how often women are sexually assaulted in our city is nonsense In fact the real decisions about how many sexual assault complaints end up in the final numbers are significantly impacted by decisions made in the shadows […]