Urban Labs Crime Lab
We partner with cities and communities to use data and rigorous research to design, test and scale programs and policies that enhance public safety, improve educational outcomes, and advance justice.
Latest Reports
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Crime Lab Gun Violence in Chicago (and what could have been)
Crime Lab A Deeper Look at What the Data Tells Us About Chicago's Carjackings
Crime Lab Violence Reduction Dashboard
Crime Lab Partnership between Crime Lab & Council on Criminal Justice
Urban Labs Supporting Those on Chicago's Frontline During the Pandemic
Urban Labs Choose to Change
Urban Labs The First 10: A Report
Crime Lab Crime and Poverty in Chicago
Crime Lab Access to and Use of Guns in Chicago by those Prohibited from Owning Firearms, 2016
Crime Lab Chicago Sports Alliance
Urban Labs Preventing Failures to Appear in Court
Urban Labs Connect & Redirect to Respect
Crime Lab Innovation for a Safe Chicago
Crime Lab Crime in Chicago: Beyond the Headlines
Crime Lab New Working Paper on Summer Jobs
Crime Lab Gun Violence in Chicago, 2016
Our Theory of Change.
In cities across the country, people face high rates of gun violence, and social harms associated with the criminal justice system, all of which disproportionately impact people of color. These inequalities have profound consequences on public safety and opportunity. Governments have failed to address them, in part, because their complexity makes it difficult to find effective and fair solutions that have a real impact on people's lives. The Crime Lab aims to fill this gap by combining world-class data science and research and implement evidence-based programs and policies because improving the public sector is the only way to make progress at scale. Our goal is to have an outsized impact on our streets and in our courts to support neighborhoods that have disproportionately suffered from these problems for decades.
Watch this video to see the progress we have made over the last ten years, and what we have in store for the next ten.
How We Work
We are charting a new course for how the world’s leading research universities can work in partnership with their home cities. We analyze policies and identify evidenced-based solutions to tackle today’s most pressing social challenges, through collaborations with faculty not just at the University of Chicago but at leading institutions around the country such as UC Berkeley, Carnegie Mellon, Cornell, Duke, Harvard, Michigan, Northwestern, NYU, Princeton, University of Pennsylvania, and Yale. As part of the University of Chicago, our projects and partnerships are subject to the university’s internal vetting procedures to ensure our work is ethical, transparent, rigorous, and objective. We have a responsibility to act urgently and always center the lived experience of the neighborhoods and people for whom we do this work first.
We partner with cities to help keep communities safe from gun violence. Many of the programs we design and test connect those who are most likely to be involved in gun violence with social services, job training and behavioral science-informed supports. We also work to improve law enforcement agencies by helping to implement necessary reforms, including those recommended by the Obama Administration Department of Justice as part of Chicago’s consent decree.
To see a list of our projects, click here.
We work to remedy the harms of America’s broken criminal justice system by developing and testing programs and tools that offer alternatives to policing and incarceration, limit racial disparities in pre-trial detention, and support individuals re-entering their communities. Our goal is to have an outsized impact on our streets and in our courts to support individuals and communities that have disproportionately suffered from the harms of our criminal justice system for decades.
To see a list of our projects, click here.
Our People
Crime Lab staff partner with civic and community leaders to generate evidence on what works to tackle crime, violence, and the collateral costs the criminal justice system.
