Cook County, Ill., has unveiled a new dashboard that pulls back the curtain on death itself, offering public workers and agencies a real-time glimpse into how societal issues — from opioid addiction to gun violence — are claiming lives. It is also calling to attention how death is affecting the community disproportionately within different races and neighborhoods, Governing reports. The new Cook County Medical Examiner Case Archive Dashboard is capable of filtering for opioid-related, gun-related and extreme temperature-related deaths, classifying them into one of the following categories: accident, homicide, natural, pending, suicide or undetermined.
President Toni Preckwinkle of the Cook County Board of Commissioners said that weather, opioid and gun-related deaths account for more than one-third of all deaths handled by the medical examiner's office each year. She said that 72 percent of the county’s 1,821 opioid-related deaths in 2023 were among communities of color, while 86 percent of the 942 gun-related deaths were Black and Latino residents. “As hard as these numbers are to deal with, we must face them head on,” said Preckwinkle. She added that the goal is to not simply present alarming statistics, but create meaningful change so that there may be a day where the dashboard is no longer needed. The dashboard includes data from August 2014 to the present, with new information updated twice daily. The tool doesn’t publish names of those who have died or exact locations to protect privacy. Rather than providing an exact address, the data are presented by ZIP code. At first glance, the new dashboard map looks like a kaleidoscope of colors. However, a dive further into the tool reveals how vast problems like opioid-related deaths are in Cook County. In some areas of Chicago, dots representing opioid deaths fill neighborhoods, revealing that in many cases, multiple people have died on the same block from an opioid-related death in the last 10 years.
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