During winter and spring 2013, Project NIA was excited to work with students in an Introductory GIS class taught by Dr. Michael Stiehl at Loyola University.  Ashley Cook, Zygmunt Czykieta, Paul Mack, and Chris Skrable collaborated to produce maps and an interactive application for us using juvenile arrest data obtained through a request and also directly through the Chicago Police Department Portal. To view the maps made by the students, you can visit the interactive page here. 

Below, we are pleased to feature information that the students developed on crime and arrest data for individual CPS schools for the 2011-2012 academic year. The table features information downloaded from the CPD portal from August 31, 2011 to June 20, 2012. The data includes only the crimes reported between 8am - 5pm.  There were 6, 460 school-day arrests occurring on CPS property from 2011-2012.

A few preliminary observations may be made based on the data in the table above:

● Simple battery: In 2011-2012, simple battery accounted for 32% of school day crimes and arrests on CPS campuses.  

​● Alcohol/drug violations:  Alcohol and drug violations accounted for 9% of school day crimes, but for 28% of CPS arrests, with near 100% arrest rates for these offenses.  This suggests that stiff drug-related penalties in schools (possibly including mandatory arrests) are a significant contributing factor in the school-to-prison pipeline.

● The three highest arrest rate crime types in CPS schools in 2011-2012 after drug/alcohol offenses were disturbances of the peace (66%), weapons violations (53%), and criminal trespass (50%).  

While there is no way of determining from this data the percentage of these offenses that were perpetrated by non-students intruding illegally on CPS property during the school day, the nature of these offenses may suggest other instances of the criminalization of otherwise typical “schoolyard” bad behavior.