Data

Lies, damned lies, and crime statistics.

ShotSpotter, Flock Safety, and Fog Data Science pitch themselves as third-party public-safety platforms, but they really are are “data brokers”—companies that profit by selling bulk information to others.

The Bureau of Justice Statistics has suffered from years of poor funding and political interference by the Trump administration. Fixing it could be one of the most important tasks on Biden’s criminal justice reform agenda.

The state’s law enforcement agencies failed to implement a 2018 data-sharing law. Now officials are struggling to identify high-risk people to release from county jails.

At a time when it’s vital to reduce jail and prison populations to prevent outbreaks, this data can help advocates identify areas where that is or is not happening.

On Friday, in what her office called, “the first [release] of its kind in the country,” Cook County State’s Attorney Kim Foxx made public six years of felony criminal case data.