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sc3 / cook-convictions-data

Django project for loading, cleaning and querying data about criminal convictions in Cook County, Illinois
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Additional analyses? #20

Closed fgregg closed 9 years ago

fgregg commented 9 years ago

What's the status of this project? Are you going to be doing additional analyses?

Here's some questions I think could have a real impact.

  1. What is the distribution of the time between arrest and final disposition, broken down by charge. Speedy justice? For what types of charges do we need more capacity?
  2. Do police districts vary in their conviction rates. We have arrest data from the data portal and now we have conviction data. Does the rate of convictions per arrest vary?
  3. How do charges get pled down from initial charge to final charge?
danxoneil commented 9 years ago

Hi, Forest. Status is that we just launched it yesterday and we're definitely into doing additional analysis. Good questions, especially the first one, which is easily done with the data in hand. We're on this— thank you!

If there is arrest data on the data portal, that would be news to me. They certainly have crime reports, but I don't think they have arrest reports. We wrote about arrest data in Chicago on another project, Crime and Punishment in Chicago: http://crime-punishment.smartchicagoapps.org/arrest.html. Given the data, via FOIA, this could probably be determined.

On how charges are are pled down, Tracy Siska is probably the most knowledgable person on that— a blog post from him might shed light.

Other colleagues on the project might have other stuff to add. Keep the ideas coming!

fgregg commented 9 years ago

The crime data doesn't have arrest data, but the the crime reports do have a field that indicate whether an arrest was made in connection to report (the exact meaning of that field is unclear to me). For certain classes of crime, like drug possession, it seems like the report is never really made without an arrest.

For the plea down, don't you have the data in here: you have initial charge and final charge, right?

On Wed, Dec 17, 2014 at 12:03 PM, danxoneil notifications@github.com wrote:

Hi, Forest. Status is that we just launched it yesterday and we're definitely into doing additional analysis. Good questions, especially the first one, which is easily done with the data in hand. We're on this— thank you!

If there is arrest data on the data portal, that would be news to me. They certainly have crime reports, but I don't think they have arrest reports. We wrote about arrest data in Chicago on another project, Crime and Punishment in Chicago: http://crime-punishment.smartchicagoapps.org/arrest.html. Given the data, via FOIA, this could probably be determined.

On how charges are are pled down, Tracy Siska is probably the most knowledgable person on that— a blog post from him might shed light.

Other colleagues on the project might have other stuff to add. Keep the ideas coming!

— Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub https://github.com/sc3/cook-convictions-data/issues/20#issuecomment-67364639 .

773.888.2718

danxoneil commented 9 years ago

Ah, I understand re: arrest data. And yes that field and the underlying data seems specious to me.

Re: plea down-- yes, have the data, for sure. Not sure it answers the question, "how" though. Classic expert analysis/ explication might help.

ghing commented 9 years ago

Yeah arrest date is sketchy. In many cases, it's years before the disposition date. I could never get a clear answer about the exact meaning of the field or the reason for the wide range of dates relative to other dates in the same record.

ghing commented 9 years ago

Oh, also from this data alone , I don't think we can map to police district because the address is the convicted person's stated home address, not the address of the crime/arrest.

fgregg commented 9 years ago

That's interesting about the arrest date.

On Wed, Dec 17, 2014 at 12:50 PM, Geoffrey Hing notifications@github.com wrote:

Oh, also from this data alone , I don't think we can map to police district because the address is the convicted person's stated home address, not the address of the crime/arrest.

— Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub https://github.com/sc3/cook-convictions-data/issues/20#issuecomment-67371631 .

773.888.2718

fgregg commented 9 years ago

@ghing the date thing is the type of thing that twitter can help with.

tjakester commented 9 years ago

The answer is that we would need significant amount of data from the CPD that is just not available. I created the Chicago Justice Project to fight for these types of data to be made public.

The CPD incident data online details whether an arrest has been made, but it is a bland flat field. For instance you are missing how many offenders there were and how many have been arrested, the field just details whether or a single arrest has been made. There are many arrests that never see the court system because they are kicked before entering the system, this data is not currently available.

As for the speedy justice issue we would need a significant increase in the amount of data from the courts to determine this and to determine the causes. I am not sure a quick end to a case is good thing. Also, there are significant interests by the defense to drag on cases as long as they can hoping the time drives either the victim or the witnesses to stop participating. We would have to have access to exactly who filed the motions for extensions and why, then we would have to make a qualitative judgement ab out the legitimacy of those requests. I am no where near ready to do such a thing.

On Dec 17, 2014, at 1:04 PM, Forest Gregg notifications@github.com wrote:

That's interesting about the arrest date.

On Wed, Dec 17, 2014 at 12:50 PM, Geoffrey Hing notifications@github.com wrote:

Oh, also from this data alone , I don't think we can map to police district because the address is the convicted person's stated home address, not the address of the crime/arrest.

— Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub https://github.com/sc3/cook-convictions-data/issues/20#issuecomment-67371631 .

773.888.2718 — Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub.

— We have moved!

Tracy Siska | Executive Director Chicago Justice Project | 811 S. Bishop St. Suite 2R | Chicago, IL 60607 Ph. (312) 971-6745

tsiska@chicagojustice.org | www.chicagojustice.org Twitter: CJPJustProj | Facebook: Become a Fan

fgregg commented 9 years ago

Got it. Thanks for your responses and thanks again for shaking this data loose!