In a normal, pre-pandemic year in Cook County, between 40,000 and 42,000 people die. But in 2020, that figure topped 52,000. In 2021 it remained high, at more than 47,000. It will likely stay unusually high in 2022.

Although sex crimes overall are notoriously underreported, and data is not easily accesible, in Cicero some of the reasons may be locally specific, advocacy experts say. Non-English speakers face language barriers, people worry if they do come forward, it will not lead to arrests and even when advocates assist, the experience can be fraught with officer communication problems and delays.

For Lakeidra Chavis’ “Aftershocks” series on the experience of surviving gun violence in Chicago, she looked at nearly 15,000 claims the state processed between 2015 and 2020 for victim compensation. Less than 4 in 10 applicants in Illinois received any reimbursement. That data, and much, were available thanks to public records requests, and in this guide Chavis’ share how she obtained, analyzed, and reported on this under-investigated issue.

Residents and visitors of Illinois will soon become part of a statewide data analysis effort that will allow traffic planners to observe and study individual and group travel patterns within the state.

In this week’s FOIA round-up, analysis shows that men still vastly outnumber women in Congressional nominations to service academies, the Chicago Tribune obtained documents revealing that Chicago Police Department has been compiling profiles on citizens who spoke at their monthly board meetings, and an Oregon judge’s recent ruling could have a disastrous impact on the state’s public records law.

Last Friday, lawmakers made two major moves in challenging the use of privately-owned detention centers and prisons in the United States.

In this week’s FOIA roundup, two FOIA lawsuits push the Justice Department to release a new version of the Mueller Report, records reveal that the Connecticut police officer who shot an unarmed teen last month had worried past supervisors, and an elected city clerk in Illinois sues his city over its own FOIA processes.

In this Week’s FOIA Roundup, documents show the Department of Homeland Security officials’ baseless concern that Black Lives Matter activists would join ISIS following Ferguson protests, Pentagon damage assessments on the 2012 WikiLeaks revelations spurred by Chelsea Manning are finally available after FOIA lawsuit and a public records request from Carbondale, Illinois undermines the mayor’s account of domestic disturbance.

From restrictive laws contributing to prolonged response times, and high fees stopping the release of records, the State of State Public Records Laws is on a bumpy ride. To get a better sense of what’s going on at the state and local level, we’ve been analyzing our MuckRock data and finding the trends in records requesting.

The AI Now Institute is calling for checks on the datasets used by predictive policing systems because of concerns that the technology can perpetuate, rather than address, “dirty” policing practices.