Review of questions/answers from Tracy's contact

[Yana715]

What did you do to adjust for minors? Did you count them or exclude them or use them separately?

• My understanding is that we excluded minors. Is this correct?

Largest Unified court system

• In Cook County, all of the trial courts are under the direction of the chief judge. Is this correct?

[ghing]

@Yana715 I excluded minors from the age-bracket counts but included them in the overall and categorical counts. I excluded them from the age brackets because we don't know if we received all juvenile records and we couldn't differentiate between real juveniles and potential data-entry juveniles in any way that didn't seem arbitrary (e.g. a cut-off age). It seemed bad to include them in the age-based analysis because it's not possible to give an accurate comparison with the other age groups since the number could be smaller by ommision.

I included as many convictions as possible for the charge category figures because the question was different. The (potentially erroneously recorderd) age doesn't negate that someone was convicted for a particular offense.

[Yana715]

Thanks for the clarification.

We have a section in the Tarbell spreadsheet that says warnings, which I
believe were our caveat sections (and included the information above), but
as of now the full text in the spreadsheet doesn't seem to appear on the
site.

On Sun, Dec 7, 2014 at 3:33 PM, Geoffrey Hing notifications@github.com
wrote:

@Yana715 https://github.com/Yana715 I excluded minors from the
age-bracket counts but included them in the overall and categorical counts.
I excluded them from the age brackets because we don't know if we received
all juvenile records and we couldn't differentiate between real juveniles
and potential data-entry juveniles in any way that didn't seem arbitrary
(e.g. a cut-off age). It seemed bad to include them in the age-based
analysis because it's not possible to give an accurate comparison with the
other age groups since the number could be smaller by ommision.

I included as many convictions as possible for the charge category figures
because the question was different. The (potentially erroneously recorderd)
age doesn't negate that someone was convicted for a particular offense.

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Yana Kunichoff

Independent journalist
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832-551-6330
@YanAzure