Robert Vargas
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robvargas.bsky.social
Robert Vargas
@robvargas.bsky.social
Scholar (justiceproject.uchicago.edu)
Artist (www.robvargas.com)
CPD & the Crime Lab say 49% of carjackers are youth—but that stat comes from just 15% of cases where someone was arrested.
The other 85%? We don’t know who did it.
📊 Misleading data leads to misleading narratives. #DataMatters #Chicago
June 6, 2025 at 12:26 PM
April 22, 2025 at 3:05 PM
This painting I made sums up the main finding from our donor bias paper. For every $5 dollars donated, CPD made 56 stop and frisks at blocks with 7-elevens. arxiv.org/abs/2504.15140
April 22, 2025 at 3:03 PM
This painting is an abstract rendering of the network of donations to San Francisco police departments based on tax return data.
April 17, 2025 at 3:24 PM
This painting title “Innovation 1” is a time series graph of the spread of alternative 911 response services in cities across the USA, with Eugene Oregon being the pioneer city on the far left. On the right are all the cities that adopted this policing alternative after 2020.
April 17, 2025 at 3:24 PM
I’ll have two paintings on display at this great show in Bridgeport opening tomorrow evening at 7pm. Check it out. The show runs through May.
April 17, 2025 at 3:24 PM
*** New Paper *** We visualized historical data on the first land sales in Chicago, discovered a pattern that tells the story of the city's urbanization and sheds light on root causes of neighborhood inequality. More work based on these data is on the way.

journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...
March 27, 2025 at 7:47 PM
A new painting in progress visualizing an underappreciated root cause of Chicago’s neighborhood inequities.
March 13, 2025 at 6:08 PM