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A core component of the SAO's commitment to data transparency under State's Attorney Foxx is the regular release of felony case-level datasets, which offer an unobstructed view of the SAO's public safety work on behalf of Cook County taxpayers.
Access the SAO's public felony case-level datasets through the Cook County Open Data Portal here.
Shared through the Cook County Open Data Portal (first released on March 2, 2018), the case-level datasets contain anonymized information about every felony case processed by the SAO (dating back to roughly 2010). They are divided into four categories by stages of interaction with the SAO — Intake, Initiation, Sentencing, and Disposition, and include tens of millions of data points, representing hundreds of thousands of distinct cases.
Public Analysis
Facilitating analysis of SAO datasets by members of the community is an explicit goal of the SAO Data Team. We want to support your research, learn from it, and share it back out with the community.
If you are working on a project and have specific questions, need help interpreting the datasets, or simply need another set of eyes, please reach out to the Data Team at SAOData@cookcountyil.gov. As well, please share your findings — especially final, published projects — with the Data Team.
Finally, if you are interested in working with the SAO on quantitative research that depends on more, or different, data than the case-level datasets provide, please Submit a Data Request using this form so we can work to support you.
Additional Resources
Members of the Cook County community interested in learning more about the SAO datasets and the best tools for analyzing them are encouraged to attend a Hacking 4 Justice workshop to connect with the SAO Data Team in person. In the meantime, here are some tools and resources (not created or maintained by the SAO) that have been helpful to others:
- R: A language and environment for statistical computing and graphics.
- RStudio: A free and open-source integrated development environment for R.
- Swirl: A software package for learning the R programming language through self-paced lessons in data science and R programming.
Questions about the case-level datasets, public analysis, data resources, and anything else can be directed to SAOData@cookcountyil.gov.