Robert Vargas

Congrats!

Data Points: Illegal gun carrying in Chicago spiked in 2020 — and deadly violence followed One of the most striking changes in crime in Chicago over the past year is something few people are talking about. It’s not the utterly tragic 55% increase in homicides in 2020 compared with …

Some of crime lab's past claims, 1) An increase in gun-carrying drove the 2020 spike in violent crime, 2) Shotspotter saves lives. Manufacturing certainty for powerful. Manufacturing doubt for the less powerful.

www.chicagotribune.com/2021/04/02/d...

Crime was already trending downward when the ICE influx began, and when you map where they were active, they weren’t actually present in most of Chicago’s high crime areas.

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.

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.

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.

The New York Times SUBSCRIBE LOG IN The Opinion Pages LETTER Ending Gun Violence JUNE 20, 2016 To the Editor: Readers of "Chicago's Murder Problem" (news article, May 28) and "A Weekend in Chicago" (front page, June 5) may have concluded that longer prison sentences reduce violence. They do not. Both articles mentioned New York's three-and-a-half-year prison term for unlawful gun possession, implying that Chicago's one-year mandatory minimum sentence is insufficient. But gun violence has fallen more precipitously in Los Angeles than in New York, while unlawful gun possession remains a misdemeanor in California subject to the possibility of probation rather than jail time. Nine years later, there is no proof that New York's "get tough" prison mandate has affected gun violence in New York City, where homicide rates primarily fell a decade before it took effect, or in places like Buffalo or Rochester, where murder rates are similar to Chicago's. It's time to end our dangerous trust in mandatory sentences and demand federal funding for gun violence research. Solutions to violence are generated from facts, not tough talk from the gun and prison lobbies. STEPHANIE KOLLMANN Chicago The writer is policy director at the Children and Family Justice Center, the Bluhm Legal Clinic of Northwestern University Pritzker School of Law. A version of this letter appears in print on June 21, 2016, on page A24 of the New York edition with the headline: Ending Gun Violence.

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.

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...

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."

here's a link to Crime Lab's work hedging on the program's effectiveness at scale

www.nber.org/system/files...

why philanthropy and the business community is not supporting these programs.

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-...

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

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...

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...

6. Among other things, Trump and Noem have sent a surge of SWAT-tactic trained federal agents to Illinois to use unprecedented, brute force tactics for civil immigration enforcement; federal agents have repeatedly shot chemical munitions at groups that included media and legal observers outside the Broadview facility; and dozens of masked, armed federal agents have paraded through downtown Chicago in a show of force and control. The community’s horror at these tactics and their significant consequences have resulted in entirely foreseeable protests. In response to those protests, local and state law enforcement agencies, including the Broadview Police Department, the Cook County Sheriff’s Office, the Illinois State Police, and others, have been deployed to Broadview to maintain the peace. And ICE continues to operate the facility to process the hundreds of individuals it has detained in recent weeks. There is no legal or factual justification for Defendants’ Federalization Order. 7. Defendants’ deployment of federalized troops to Illinois is patently unlawful. Plaintiffs ask this court to halt the illegal, dangerous, and unconstitutional federalization of members of the National Guard of the United States, including both the Illinois and Texas National Guard. Because this federalization is patently pretextual and baseless, Defendants cannot satisfy any of the three prerequisites for involuntarily federalizing any of the National Guard of the United States under 10 U.S.C. § 12406. Not only have the defendants acted outside the authority of 10 U.S.C. § 12406, but their conduct also violates the Posse Comitatus Act, the Administrative Procedure Act, and, of paramount concern, several provisions of the U.S. Constitution. 8. The Trump administration’s illegal actions already have subjected and are subjecting Illinois to serious and irreparable harm. The deployment of federalized National Guard,

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

Good lord. Does nobody on his staff know about the data portal?

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

That tweet made me think it was a headline from the onion. I don’t even know where to start.

The public-private partnership model leaves public safety dependent on private goodwill. When donors lose interest, programs disappear. Violence prevention’s enemies are not just in the White House, they’re in the room signing checks with one hand and blocking taxes with the other.

Criticizing Trump for sending troops into cities and not addressing the economic inequality driving crime is one thing. But casting violence prevention as a smarter and less expensive alternative is tone deaf given that the Black/brown VP work force earns a fraction of what first responders earn.

Opinion | Trump’s Crackdown Will Make Crime Worse

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.

Fantastic work!