HeyJackass: The Unofficial Ledger of Chicago Crime Statistics

HeyJackass is what happens when someone decides that a city’s violence statistics should be published continuously, in public, with no press office in between. It is a running tally of Chicago shootings and homicides, sliced by neighborhood, hour, demographic and cause, updated all year and archived going back over a decade. It is also, unmistakably, angry.

What is HeyJackass?

The site describes itself as illustrating Chicago values, which tells you the tone before you see a single number. It is an independent, one-site operation that scrapes and compiles from police blotters, news reports and public records, then publishes the results as a dashboard of tables, pie charts and year-over-year comparisons.

The reason it exists is a gap. Official crime reporting tends to arrive slowly, in aggregate, and framed. HeyJackass publishes running totals: shot and killed, shot and wounded, assaulted and killed, total homicides, all with a year-to-date figure and a comparison to the same date last year. Then it keeps going: shootings by neighborhood, by month, by day of week, by hour of the day. Age and gender of victims. Fatality rate per shooting. Where on the body people were hit.

That last category is a fair warning about what this site is. It is not a curated news product, it is a spreadsheet made public, and it does not soften anything.

Its counts frequently differ from the police department’s, because it uses its own criteria for what belongs in a total. That divergence is itself part of the point, and the site is fairly open about how it counts. Anyone quoting a figure from here should read the methodology notes first and label the source honestly.

Journalists cite it. Researchers argue with it. Residents check it the way other people check the weather. Whatever you think of the editorial voice, the underlying achievement is real: someone has maintained a granular, continuously updated public record of a major American city’s violence for over a decade, largely alone.

What can you do with HeyJackass?

• Check the year-to-date totals. The front page leads with shot-and-killed, shot-and-wounded, and total homicide counts, alongside the previous year’s figure at the same date.
• Break it down by neighborhood. Community-area tables show where the counts concentrate, which is far more uneven than citywide numbers suggest.
• Look at time-of-day and day-of-week charts. Violence has a schedule, and the hourly distribution makes it obvious.
• Read the demographic breakdowns. Age brackets, gender, and victim characteristics are all tabulated rather than summarized.
• Compare years. Archived year-end pages let you place the current numbers against a decade of history instead of last week.
• Follow the monthly recaps. Each month gets its own summary with the running totals rolled forward.
• Cross-check the news. When a headline claims a record or a collapse, the site is a quick way to see the underlying trend line.

Tips to get the most out of it

Read the methodology before you quote a number. The inclusion criteria differ from official reporting. If you cite a total without saying where it came from and how it was counted, you will eventually be embarrassed.

Use the yearly archives, not the front page, for arguments. Single-week movement in these numbers is noise. The comparison worth making is year over year, and the archive pages exist for exactly that.

Look at the neighborhood tables first. Citywide figures flatten a city where the distribution is extremely concentrated. The community-area breakdown is the more honest picture.

Separate the data from the commentary. The site’s voice is sardonic and openly contemptuous, and that will color how you read the tables. The numbers and the framing are two different things, and only one of them is sourced.

Remember these are people. It is very easy to browse this as a statistics exercise. Every increment in every column is a real person in a real neighborhood, and the site’s own bluntness can make that easier to forget, not harder.

If you like HeyJackass, also try…

• Homicide Monitor: the same subject at global scale, mapped country by country by the Igarapé Institute.
• Violation Tracker: a public ledger of corporate misconduct, built on the same instinct that records should be searchable.
• Worldometers: live counters for population, health and consumption, updating in front of you.
• The Pudding: visual essays that do the interpretive work raw dashboards deliberately skip.

More data with edges in Data & Research.