Better Government Association seeks public input for Cook County criminal justice system database

Injustice Watch, the Chicago Reporter and DataMade paired up with BGA for project

ByABC 7 Chicago Digital Team WLS logo
Saturday, April 3, 2021
BGA seeks public input for Cook County criminal justice system database
The Better Government Association wants to hear from the community regarding its Cook County criminal justice system database.

CHICAGO (WLS) -- The Better Government Association wants to hear from the community for their ongoing collaborative project on decoding the Cook County criminal justice system.

Olivia Obineme from the BGA joined ABC 7 Chicago Saturday morning to talk about it.

The project, dubbed The Circuit, was created when DataMade wrote a program that copied the entire Cook County Courts database, enabling the team to analyze decades of data on every single event that occurred in every single criminal case going back to 2000. This project allowed the team to look at millions of cases at once and do aggregate analysis.

The Circuit was created in collaboration with Injustice Watch, the Chicago Reporter and DataMade.

RELATED: Cook County criminal justice system explored in new Better Government Association project

Five months into the launch, the team is looking for personal narratives from community members. They've shared postcards to a couple of zip codes on the West Side.

You can find The Circuit on the Better Government Association website at bettergov.org.