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Report: Suburban Cook County has more DUI cases than Chicago

Suburban Cook County has more DUI cases than all of Chicago, with 901 to the city's 797 in 2016.

Compared to Chicago, the suburbs also had more felony cases of burglary, battery and aggravated battery of police officers last year.

But Chicago leads in other categories of criminal court cases, including homicide, where the city had 383 cases presented for prosecution last year, compared to 120 from the Cook County suburbs.

That's just some of the information included in a report issued Tuesday by Cook County State's Attorney Kim Foxx, who said she wanted to make her office more accountable.

The report also includes racial data for felonies brought before the criminal, narcotics and special prosecution divisions of the state's attorney's office.

For the most common charge, unlawful use of a weapon, 80 percent of those charged were identified by the arresting officers as black, 14 percent as Latino, 4 percent as white and 2 percent as other, which includes defendants for whom no racial information was given, according to Foxx's report.

Among defendants in retail theft cases, the second most common charge, 61 percent were identified as black, 23 percent as white, 11 percent as Latino and 5 percent unknown. For DUI cases, 47 percent of defendants were Latino, 33 percent were white, 16 percent were black and 4 percent were of unidentified race.

The report did not provide an overall racial breakdown for the 30,000 felony cases presented for prosecution in Cook County last year, though it links to the raw data.

Overall, suburban felony cases made up 46 percent of the felonies. The suburbs make up about 48 percent of the population of Cook County.

Retail theft was the most common felony charge in the suburbs, with 1,393 cases, compared to 1,668 in Chicago.

Impaired driving, including DUI and aggravated DUI, was the second most common felony charge initiated in the county's suburban court districts, which include Rolling Meadows, Skokie, Bridgeview, Markham and Maywood.

Foxx said she'll add more data every year.

“When I took office, I made a commitment to dramatically increasing the transparency of the state's attorney's office,” Foxx said in a prepared statement.

“This report represents an important first step in that process.”

The report is available online at cookcountystatesattorney.org/data.

Kim Foxx
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