Front & Center #10: The Cook County Criminal Justice Data Dashboard: Bookmark It!

The Cook County Criminal Justice Data Dashboard: Bookmark It!

June 24th was the long-awaited (at least around here) launch date of the Cook County Criminal Justice Data Dashboard. Built by the Center in collaboration with an array of local justice agencies and the support of the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the Dashboard was unveiled at an online media event featuring Loyola CCJ Codirectors Dave Olson and Don Stemen alongside Cook County Board President Tony Preckwinkle, Chief Judge Tim Evans, State's Attorney Eileen O'Neill Burke, Public Defender Sharone Mitchell and other county leaders, all of whom were upbeat about the shared commitment to transparency that the Dashboard represents and embodies. President Preckwinkle said the Dashboard “will help us keep pushing toward a criminal justice system that is more fair and effective,” and thanked Olson and Stemen personally “for sticking with us for all these years.”

It has been a long haul. The Dashboard is the product of years of painstaking collaborative work—involving, by our rough count, more than 150 meetings! But the end result is a true system dashboard, providing the public with timely and comprehensive data from a variety of sources on criminal incident reporting, arrests, criminal case processing, dispositions, sentencing, and jail, prison and parole populations over the period from 2018 to the present, to provide a total picture of crime and the responses to crime in the state’s largest county.

To give a sense of the utility of this new tool, and what it’s capable of showing us, Dave Olson cited the “broad change” the Dashboard reveals in the system’s recent handling of two common kinds of criminal activity: drug crime and weapons possession.

• In 2018, Chicago Police made 10,000 felony drug arrests. Drug cases accounted for almost a fifth of all felony cases filed in Cook County, and almost a quarter of the county’s prison admissions. Six years later, in 2024, Chicago Police made fewer than 5,000 felony drug arrests, felony drug cases accounted for just 11% of cases filed, and the share of prison admissions for drug offenses had shrunk to 6%.
• But just as police were bringing fewer drug offenses to prosecutors (who in turn filed fewer formal prosecutions and sought fewer prison terms), they brought many more gun cases, with weapons arrests doubling during the same six-year period and weapons case filings rising more than 40%. And because these offenses often carried mandatory prison sentences, the share of original court admissions to prison from Cook County represented by weapons offenders rose from 22% to 42%.

This shows, as Olson pointed out at the Dashboard launch event, “how the entire system has changed its priorities.” It’s not any one actor or agency. “It’s the collective impact of everybody doing something different.”

PFA Update: What Do Detention Hearings Look Like Now?

In June, Loyola CCJ researchers began another round of structured observations in Illinois courtrooms, as part of our ongoing monitoring of the ways the Pretrial Fairness Act (PFA) is changing pretrial practice and outcomes throughout the state. We’ve been doing this since June 2022, before the PFA took effect—this will be our fourth wave of hearing observations. By the time the summer is over, we’ll have gathered observation data on thousands of pretrial detention hearings in six Illinois counties (Cook, Lake, DuPage, Kane, McHenry, and Will), as part of a parallel study with researchers from John Jay College in New York, who will be doing similar observations in New York arraignment hearings in an effort to assess the workings of that state’s 2019 bail reform law.

We’ve reported findings from our court observations before—including the basic finding that PFA detention hearings, at least in the early going, were longer, more substantive, and more focused than bail hearings had been. But we acknowledged county-level variations, as well as the possibility that hearings could become more cursory over time, as courtroom actors settle into routines.

So what do these hearings look like now, after nearly two years? We’re still in the first month of observations, but a few basic patterns are worth flagging:

• Careful, substantive hearings continue. We have not seen any obvious drop-off in the length or quality of detention hearings.
• “Mini-trials” are not occurring. One reported fear regarding the PFA among practitioners was that the basic precondition for any detention—a “clear and convincing” demonstration from the State that “the proof is evident or the presumption great” that the defendant committed a qualifying offense—would require the parties to call witnesses and otherwise contest the facts at the very outset of the case. That hasn’t happened. Witness testimony in detention hearings is rare; in most courtrooms, detention decisions are based entirely on the proffer of evidence—that is, the prosecutor’s summary of the evidence intended to be presented—rather than on the evidence itself.
• Hearings tend to share a common “three-prong” structure. While differing in details, detention hearings in different counties are structured by the basic requirements of the PFA, which calls for the state to make its case for pretrial detention under three distinct “prongs.” (The term “prong” does not appear in the law but seems to have been adopted informally everywhere.) The first prong of required proof, as noted above, concerns the defendant’s commission of a detainable offense. The second requires a showing that pretrial release would pose a “real and present threat” to the safety of any person or the community, or else a risk of flight from prosecution. The third prong requires proof that “less restrictive conditions” than outright detention would not address the safety threat or prevent the flight from prosecution. As a result of these requirements, all detention hearings begin more or less the same way, with a prong-by-prong demonstration from the prosecutor, followed by a defense presentation that contests one or all of the prongs, while adding in selected “mitigating” facts about the defendant. At the conclusion, before announcing the court’s order regarding detention or release, the judge sums up the evidence and makes findings for the record regarding whether the state has met its burden with respect to each prong.
• Decisions are clear-cut, and accompanied by reasons. It’s worth noting that one of the most significant practice changes made by the PFA is that judges now conclude every detention hearing by explicitly announcing their detention/release decisions and explaining the reasons for them, “based on the specific articulable facts of the case.” Many judges take this opportunity to offer their own summations, lining up and reviewing all the significant evidence on both sides, and sometimes leaving the impression that they are thinking out loud or even talking their way to a decision. But invariably they conclude by announcing a definite decision—detain or release—and placing on the record some reasoned justification for it. This in itself presents the strongest possible contrast with the typical bail hearing under the pre-PFA system, which rarely featured articulated justification from the bench or produced definitive decisions regarding whether the defendant should or should not be detained until trial.

We’ll be reporting more of what our court observers are seeing as their results come in later this summer. But from our observations in Cook County, it’s already clear that unique detention issues and anomalies will require separate analysis.

One reason is the extraordinary predominance, noted above, of weapons cases, which raise unusual issues in the detention context. Can mere illegal possession of a firearm, without more, constitute a “real and present threat” to the community’s safety? In cases where guns are recovered following a search, a common defense argument is that they involve no “violence”—no 911 call, no complaint, no victim. But prosecutors in Cook County detention hearings have been making counter-arguments that are essentially grounded in the “nature and seriousness of the offense” of illegal gun-carrying. One judge we observed, in accepting this line of argument, seemed to suggest that the stiff statutory penalties for illegal gun possession amount to a sort of legislative declaration—that people who possess guns illegally must pose a threat to the community. Another cited the actual hazards that illegal guns present to police officers, whose job requires them to conduct dangerous searches for them. This is close to saying that illegal possession is inherently dangerous, at least to some community members.

Of course, public safety arguments in detention hearings are often based on more than mere possession of a gun. Where possible, prosecutors point out aggravating circumstances (like having a gun on public transportation, or in the presence of children), or aggravating behavior (like gun-waving or brandishing, or heedlessly throwing away a loaded gun while in flight from the police). Arguments for detention often involve features of the gun itself as well: stolen guns, “ghost” guns, and guns with defaced serial numbers are harder to trace, and so more likely to be used in violent crimes. Guns with laser sights, extended magazines, or devices that convert them into automatic weapons are more lethal. Guns that are loaded obviously present more immediate dangers than unloaded ones—especially if there is “one in the chamber,” as prosecutors often put it.

Guns are one part of the backstory in Cook. But the county is also undergoing an unusual transition with respect to its capacity to provide electronic monitoring of defendants on pretrial release. One question our statewide evaluation seeks to answer is whether and how the PFA, by restricting pretrial detention, may be increasing the use of pretrial electronic monitoring. Answering that question for Cook will be complicated by the fact that the Cook County Sheriff Department’s is currently phasing out its large-scale electronic monitoring program, originally established as an emergency response to crowding in the Cook County Jail. While pretrial electronic monitoring is still available under a separate program administered by the Office of the Chief Judge, local prosecutors have been routinely—and often successfully—opposing its use for defendants who are judged dangerous, in part on the ground that the program has no uniformed enforcement staff to respond immediately to violations.

Our statewide evaluation of the PFA has to take into account many county-level nuances and backstories like these. Court observations are one good way to get wind of them.

Gender Violence Survey of Incarcerated Women

An ambitious new survey research project being led by CCJ Research Professor Amanda Ward is exploring the nature and prevalence of incarcerated women’s experiences of gender violence, including possible links among gender violence, traumatic brain injury and women’s incarceration. In collaboration with the Women’s Justice Institute (WJI) and with the cooperation of the Illinois Department of Corrections (IDOC), Ward and WJI's team recently went on the road visiting Illinois prisons, including the Logan Correctional Center, the Decatur Correctional Center and the Fox Valley Adult Transition Center, speaking to women in custody there and inviting them to participate in a detailed and intensive survey aimed at expanding knowledge of the role of gender violence in shaping women’s pathways to prison. The survey included questions about women and transpeople's histories of abuse and violence, including sexual violence. Survey administrators, many of whom had experienced incarceration themselves, were trained to recognize signs of distress, and to respond with de-escalation techniques and referrals. More than a thousand incarcerated women, transwomen and transmen responded—a remarkable participation rate that Ward attributes to WJI’s involvement in the project.

Although the survey was made available in paper form, most took it on computer tablets especially rented for the project—the first time IDOC has allowed prison surveys to be administered in this way. Results will be tabulated and analyzed in the coming months, and a report will be issued by the end of the summer.

Our Tenth Birthday: Celebrating with Numbers

2025 marks the Center for Criminal Justice’s tenth year of operation as the interdisciplinary home for criminal justice research at Loyola University Chicago. Established in 2015 with a founding grant from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, we’ve been pursuing our twin goals—providing criminal justice practitioners and policy makers with objective research, and students with practical research experience—ever since.

A sadder milestone this month is the departure of our valued colleague Branden DuPont, after three brilliant years as CCJ’s Director of Analytics. We wish Branden all the best in his new job, as Chief Data Analytics and Research Officer at the New York Criminal Justice Research Agency.

For more on our activities during the 2024-25 academic year, check out our latest Year in Review report.