UPDATE - We got some good questions about seasonality, and added a map to the study website comparing response times in the first 9 months of 2025 to first 9 months of 2024. The change in response times is more modest (2 minute improvement on average), but the overall trend still holds.

NEW REPORT: After Chicago shut down ShotSpotter in Sept. 2024, CPD response times to priority 1 calls improved by an average of 4.2 minutes. Read more here: uchicago-justice-project.github.io/chicago_crim...

Tonight, at Pilsen Books, Stuart Schader and I will be talking about his new book "Blue Power: How Police Organized to Protect and Serve Themselves."

Recall: CPD knew this Saturday. The Cook State's Attorney likely knew it that same day but certainly by Monday. It's now Friday afternoon. Snelling and Burke have allowed/encouraged the political fallout about pretrial release to proceed w/o informing the public, Burke blaming electronic monitoring

For anyone in government or the nonprofit sector anticipating the AI avalanche on the way to automate government - READ THIS BOOK. a.co/d/02DLtvJA

Mark your calendars - On Wednesday May 13th at 7pm, I'll be at Pilsen Community Books with Historian Stuart Schrader to discuss his new book "Blue Power: How Police Organized to Protect and Serve Themselves." Come check it out. pilsencommunitybooks.com/events/20260...

Squeezed by data centers' relentless demand for electricity, a Nevada energy company just said it's going to stop supplying energy to Tahoe. The city has a year to figure out how to meet 75% of its energy needs without it.

What's missing? The public. Decisions about whether AI can surveil American citizens or autonomously deploy lethal force are being settled in a contract dispute. No Congress. No democratic deliberation. No accountability. We've outsourced questions about the use of force to a corporate negotiation.

Important to note that these declines happened without a snap curfew and without restoring shotspotter. This will be crucial to remember when some elected officials try to seize on the next moral panic to pour more taxpayer money to fund bad crime-fighting ideas.

Trump declares war on state AI laws, including a law I passed to ensure transparency of AI safety protocols. He’s doing so purportedly to promote U.S. AI “dominance.” Of course, he just authorized chip sales to China & Saudi Arabia: the exact opposite of ensuring U.S. dominance.

Some more great work on the privatized world of police psuedoscience.

Still true enough 9.5 years later, the only part of this that shocks me is that I had to write it under my own name because it was so "controversial" #thanksRahm

This is one story on lisence plate readers. A quick search about other surveillance (especially police access to databases) will reveal this is a major problem for stalking and gendered violence. With all the new data streams going into lookup tools these days, this problem will only get worse.

Turns out much of the great research on ShotSpotter was the result of a CPD FOIA mistake. I wrote about how this signals the need for reforming how Chicago does business with tech, especially with so much AI tools for government on the way. chicago.suntimes.com/other-views/...

"There are few rights that residents have in the face of bondholder demands. Most importantly, perhaps, the officials put in charge of governing the city by the supposedly sovereign people have little recourse or room to maneuver in the face of their power."

Coverage like this is inaccurate and simply not productive. It's tempting to quote the the crime lab's own written work, which admits that these programs effectiveness dwindled as scale increased, but don't take the bait. The real question is... chicago.suntimes.com/city-hall/20...

Thinking about when Willie Wilson said police “should be able to chase them [anyone who runs from police] down, and hunt them down like a rabbit,” and Paul Vallas wanted to “take the handcuffs off police.” Everyone’s getting to see what that looks like in practice now & they don’t seem to like it.

the lesson of zohran mamdani walloping one of the most racist campaigns in modern us history on the largest turnout since 1969 is that democrats need to move to the right

Just published an annual review of a field we're calling "The Political Economy of Policing." It highlights great work on the links between police and society's major political/economic institutions. Thanks to my great coauthors Lauren Hagani and Gabe Rojas. www.annualreviews.org/content/jour...

Illinois v. Trump lawsuit seems to confirm the idea that the recent surge of county and state police departments outside of the Broadview ICE facility was decided to preempt the Federalization Order. I'm not justifying that decision per se, but it appears to be the least poor of two poor options.

The Jimmy Kimmel news got me thinking of Stuart Hall saying, “Where are the emergent forces? Where are the cracks and the contradictions? What are the elements in public consciousness one could mobilize for a different political program?"

The president of the United States just declared war, actual military war, not a metaphorical one, on a major American city, and one governed by his political opponents. In any other period, this would be impeachment-worthy.

ICE just reactivated its contract with an Israeli firm that makes phone-hacking spyware. Here's what you should know. #ICE #NewsUS #Hacking #spyware

Cities so desperately need more help negotiating the terms of their contracts with private entities. What a world we live in where presidents can shutter federal agencies with a flick of a switch but cities can't get out of their contract with surveillance tech firms.

It's a conflict of interest not to have a conflict of interest with the police lmao

Pleased to see attention brought to Chicago’s public-private funding of violence prevention. But feels like the private sector wants it both ways. Celebrate crime declines from programs they fund but opposing taxes for scaling these programs permanently. www.nytimes.com/2025/08/22/o...

Ida B. Wells-Barnett’s theorizing about lynching in relation to the carceral system helped me understand how—like today—people and institutions may fight over who has dominion over committing racial violence, detentions, and executions, but they aren’t antagonistic to each other’s political project.

Wow

🚨NEW: This is what all networks should do! MSNBC fact checks Trump live during his press conference. The REAL crime stats are put on screen as he reads out his made up figures.

Proud of David Hackett for fielding questions about our study live on WGN. For folks worried about the 54 deaths at locations where the tech was turned off, please note that more deaths occurred at those places when Shotspotter was ON last year. wgntv.com/news/chicago...

A powerful op-ed that should really open some eyes.

With everyone under the sun trying to claim credit for Chicago’s 2025 crime decline, we created this interactive granular map to examine some of the most popular claims. Take a look. If you have claims you’d like us to fact check, let us know! uchicago-justice-project.github.io/chicago_crim...

This is a reason why I've been skeptical about the Mayor's claim that improved clearance rates have contributed to the decrease in crime.

CPD has steadfastly claimed responding officers did not know immigration activity was happening on June 4. But a phone call to OEMC from a police captain in CPD HQ shows he knew it was Homeland Security Investigations—an arm of ICE—but didn't want to broadcast that or "make it a media thing."

Chicago: The city of moving goal posts. I hope Mamdani's people in NYC are taking notes.

State + local budgets will be torpedoed by the deathmonger bill. It will be beyond tempting for your state/local politicians to try to fill in the gaps by seeking the only new federal assistance $ available to help offset huge expenses: billions in ICE $ for policing and jails. Strategize NOW.

Follow @thecity.nyc. We relentlessly investigate people in power & when we have the goods on them, whatever their political position, we hit publish. What we don't do: Publish crap.

NEW YORK, look at me. You need to study the election of Brandon Johnson in Chicago.

Once again, to inject some research into this conversation...although millionaires often threaten to move if taxed, that tends not to actually happen. The millionaire tax flight thing is a myth. See book below ⤵️ www.sup.org/books/sociol...

Some lessons from this great piece. 1) Crime decreases will never satisfy those pushing for surveillance, 2) opponents will frame critics of surveillance cameras as anti-small business, 3) it might be worth doing research on things that ACTUALLY help and hurt small businesses.

The end of Chicago has already happened, which is why our population grew last year.

If the direction of NYC mayoral primary holds, Mamdani’s team needs to prep for what will likely be the most insane propaganda and sabotage campaign in recent history.

"[W]e risk combining two threats: expanded policing powers, and growing private influence. What happens when police departments with unregulated donor relationships are granted emergency powers? Who will they serve when a sponsor’s retail hub is under threat from teen loitering?"

What does a snap curfew mean at a time of rising authoritarianism and privatization? The answer is grim, especially when you think long-term. Wrote about this at South Side Weekly. southsideweekly.com/opinion-who-...

I’ve stepped back from wading into the “race to the bottom-data driven” discourse on crime and policing lately, but the conclusions implied in this article are so wrong its dangerous for the city, the violence prevention community, and law enforcement.

CPD & the Crime Lab say 49% of carjackers are youth—but that stat comes from just 15% of cases where someone was arrested. The other 85%? We don’t know who did it. 📊 Misleading data leads to misleading narratives. #DataMatters #Chicago

The Chicago Sun-Times just dropped a story blaming Chicago’s carjacking surge on one crew of teens: the SRT Boys. The data tells a very different story. 🧵 chicago.suntimes.com/the-watchdog...

It was the least violent memorial day weekend in Chicago in 16 years. chicago.suntimes.com/crime/2025/0...

“In the two months that Hopkins has been urging his fellow alderpeople to expand the city’s curfew laws, no one has been seriously injured as a result of the gatherings. In addition, 19 people were killed in Chicago in April, the fewest murders during any April since 1962.”