I wanted to make a few remarks about comments in a recent Chicago Tribune editorial (synopsis here) about our new Cook County States Attorney, Eileen O’Neill Burke. I supported her in the primary and general election but I honestly think it’s too early too draw any conclusions about what her term of office will be like. All I can say about that is she is a cut above her predecessor. Two, maybe three cuts above. A great improvement which is damning with faint praise.
My first remark is about this:
But she told us something else during our conversation that was bracing indeed. As she was running for the office last year, O’Neill Burke said, “I thought guns were the biggest problem. But it turns out domestic violence is.”
In Cook County, 23 women have died allegedly at the hands of abusers just since O’Neill Burke took office in December.
Twenty-three. Let that number sink in.
Even as Laterria Smith, Jayden’s mother, saw Brand face justice a little over a year after that horrific day, women aren’t being adequately protected from the men in their lives who abuse them.
Under O’Neill Burke, prosecutors already are making some progress on this front. The rate at which Cook County judges now are detaining those accused of domestic violence while they while they await trial has increased to 81% from around 50% before she took office, she told us.
This is clearly a cultural issue. The prevalence of domestic violence among black Americans and Hispanics is a multiple of what it is among the white population. Nearly all of the women murdered by their domestic partners mentioned above were either black or Hispanic.
While I laud States Attorney Burke for her efforts in this area, it’s not enough. Unless we plan to chalk such murders up to the price of a multi-cultural society, it needs to be called out. Black and Hispanic religious, social, and political leaders need to be enlisted in the effort. People in those communities need to be encouraged to understand that such behavior is not acceptable. Law enforcement should be the last recourse not the first and only recourse.
My other remarks are about this:
We were surprised to learn that the state’s attorney’s office has no automated case management system to speak of. For felonies, there’s a system created in-house more than a decade ago on a platform that no longer is tech-supported. Assistant state’s attorneys must input into spreadsheets procedural developments in each of their many cases — something prosecutors themselves don’t have the time to do and paralegals ought to be handling. Oh, except the office has no paralegals.
and this:
The state’s attorney’s office, which has a current-year budget of $187 million, badly needs a bona fide case-management system, and that will cost millions. Money well spent, we say, because the public would have access to this important information, and the office itself could
make better decisions about resource allocation and — critically — move criminal cases through the process much faster than the current woefully slow pace of prosecutions.
I think there a whiff of Maslow’s Hammer about this (“when the only tool that you have, etc.”). I’m sad to report that they’re probably underestimating the cost of obtaining and using such a system. Think tens of millions not millions.
One of the factors that many organizations don’t seem to recognize when it comes to picking software is that an off-the-shelf software solution represents an organizational commitment to change the organization’s processes to suit what the software solution does OR customizing the software solution for the organization’s processes which renders it unsupportable by the original vendor OR not using an off-the-shelf software solution. This is particularly true of organizations with lots of professionals.
The problem of acceptance is why so many organizations buy software solutions only to discard them a few years later or, alternatively, find that the off-the-shelf software solution is being augmented with a maze of varying spreadsheets so they’re back where they started.
I would also point out that in all likelihood they already have an off-the-shelf software solution. Microsoft SharePoint. With a few relatively inexpensive commercial add-ins SharePoint can probably be configured to accomplish their needs at a fraction of the cost of a vertical market application.
It feels “automated case management system” is something an LLM is well suited to replacing or being the interface of.
There must be 10 or more startups trying to do that now.