Cook County SA Eileen O'Neill Burke's office is moving forward with prosecuting a violence-prevention volunteer who was arrested by CPD after he tried to turn in a gun at a police station. The man spent 7 months in Cook County Jail for his effort; trial begins next week.

Former Education Secretary Arne Duncan calls gun case against Chicago anti-violence volunteer a 'travesty'

Duncan runs Chicago CRED, which works to prevent shootings. He says volunteer Nakia Smith, arrested in a Far South Side police station in 2023, has been "fighting for the good." Smith, a convicted fel...

chicago.suntimes.com

The coupling of contradictory pledges for efficiency + more policing has happened enough times that it’s hard to not simply call this racialized neoliberalism. And its power seems to come from how many people take this as the norm.

Denali@denali.bsky.social · 2d ago

And on public safety, no one who is running for Mayor and talking about the city's fiscal house or using not one more dollar rhetoric should have to talk CPD budget. If they treat fiscal health and cost of policing as two separate issues it's ok to not listen to them about the city's finances.

Chicago Mayoral candidates’ position on shotspotter is a good litmus test for who is going to let AI “move fast and break things” at the expense of communities and taxpayers.

Had a great conversation with Ben Joravsky about knowledge politics about crime and tech in Chicago. Check it out below. www.thebenjoravskyshow.com/robert-varga...

Robert Vargas--Tenacious Lies

NYT reporters call Trump’s election-theft conspiracies what they are—tenacious lies Ben riffs. Robert Vargas separates truth from fiction in the matter of crime. If…

thebenjoravskyshow.com

A great new study on the effect of CPD’s sentiment dashboard, which increases trust in police among white respondents and decreases trust among Black respondents. This complicates the idea of investing in data dashboards. www.science.org/doi/abs/10.1...

When trust building looks like surveillance: Public polarization toward Chicago policing

Experimental exposure to a police trust-building initiative widened gaps in police trust and support for racial equity policies.

science.org

A reason why the study of culture and propaganda is just as important as behavioral science for studying public safety.

WTTW - Chicago PBS@wttw.bsky.social · 2w ago

More Chicagoans believe violent crime has increased in the city, according to a new public opinion poll, even as shootings and homicides throughout 2026 are essentially the same as last year, which ended with the fewest recorded killings in 60 years. https://to.wttw.com/4yw0McF

Want to see a public collection of all the times cops have been busted abusing Flock systems to stalk exes, spy on protests, or deport migrants? You can check it out here 👇🏽👇🏽👇🏽 HT @deflock library.kansas.watch

I'll be giving a virtual talk at Chi Hack Night July 21st @7pm on what Chicago can learn from the ShotSpotter debate to strengthen its civic-tech infrastructure in the AI era. You can sign up here. chihacknight.org/events/2026/...

Online: Auditing Police AI in Public - Lessons from the ShotSpotter Debate for the AI Era in Public Policy - Chi Hack Night

Professor of Sociology and Director of the Justice Project at the University of Chicago Robert Vargas will introduce “Public Interest AI Auditing” as an open-source, independent approach to evaluating...

chihacknight.org

For those interested in improving tech procurement in Chicago, check out the work of @hbwhbwhbw.bsky.social

Tech Policy Press@techpolicypress.bsky.social · last mo.

For centuries, courts and lawmakers have been the primary regulators of law enforcement investigations, placing legal limits on how police can collect information. Now, companies like Google are becoming just as influential, writes Texas A&M University School of Law professor Hannah Bloch-Wehba.

RFP: The Historical Political Economy of Taxation and Regulation. Conference and journal special issue opportunity!

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."

Robert Vargas@robvargas.bsky.social · 4mo ago

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...

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

Steve Held@peoplesfabric.bsky.social · 3mo ago

It quickly became clear that officers failed to properly search Talley before he shot two officers while in custody, but many rushed to blame a judge’s decision weeks earlier instead of the more uncomfortable proximate cause. Now it’s revealed the cops who screwed up weren’t the ones shot.

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

Auditing AI (The MIT Press Essential Knowledge series)

Auditing AI (The MIT Press Essential Knowledge series) [The Marquand House Collective] on Amazon.com. *FREE* shipping on qualifying offers. Auditing AI (The MIT Press Essential Knowledge series)

a.co

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...

Pilsen Community Books

pilsencommunitybooks.com

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.

Lake Tahoe isn’t sure where it’s power will come from after the next ski season

The area’s longtime power supplier, NV Energy, will cut off the region next year. It has said data centers are driving “unprecedented” demand.

calmatters.org

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.

Violet Miller@vimiller.bsky.social · 7mo ago

In a year when Donald Trump called Chicago the “most dangerous city in the world," citywide killings fell to a 60-year low, down ~30% from 2024, as overall crime kept dropping. It’s the first time in a decade the city has had <500 slayings in a year. 🧵/6 w/ @sophiesherry.bsky.social & Kade Heather

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.

Ensuring a National Policy Framework for Artificial Intelligence

By the authority vested in me as President by the Constitution and the laws of the United States of America, it is hereby ordered: Section 1.  Purpose.

whitehouse.gov

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

John Shjarback@shjarback-ccj.bsky.social · last yr.

🚨Why hasn't this PQ article by Adams @brandondelpozo.bsky.social et al. on the some of flaws in the Force Science Institute's (FSI) "research", which is highly influential in the courts/litigation mind you, gotten more attention in the last 10 days???🚨

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.

Matthew Guariglia@mguariglia.bsky.social · 8mo ago

Police have access to massive surveillance networks that track the public whether they are suspects or not. That means probably for every 1 officer caught using the system to harass or spy on people they have feuds with, ex's, activists, journalists, there are probably 100 more we don't know about.

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/...

Rewiring city's technology ties following ShotSpotter saga

At a moment when an authoritarian president is seeking every tool possible to target his perceived political enemies, there is no better time for Chicago to rethink how it does business with technolog...

chicago.suntimes.com

"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."

Dan Greene @dmgreene.bsky.social · 9mo ago

"If the city were to get into fiscal trouble and face a decision between paying teachers and paying bondholders, it would have to pay bondholders." -- @schooldaves.bsky.social on the uphill fight municipal socialism faces against the investment environment

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...

Johnson pledges to use head tax for youth programs, then wants to cut funding for proven mentoring efforts

Without city funding, group counseling programs now serving 1,400 Chicago Public School students in 33 schools will end on Dec. 31. Those programs have helped students endure the violence- and family-...

chicago.suntimes.com

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...

The Political Economy of Policing

This article synthesizes emerging research on the political economy of policing, conceptualized through a Gramscian framework that examines policing as an interinstitutional structure shaped by econom...

annualreviews.org

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.