Jared Rutecki

Data Journalist

United States

I am an Investigative/Special Projects Producer and Reporter for Chicago Tonight on WTTW Chicago PBS. I program in SQL, R Studio and Python. I was previously employed as an investigative reporter and data coordinator at the Better Government Association and Illinois Answers Project in Chicago, and as a web producer at The Columbus Dispatch and ThisWeek News in Ohio. In 2021, I was an Annenberg National Health Reporting Fellow at the University of Southern California.

Portfolio
Illinois Answers Project
05/04/2022
Illinois Pensions Database

Follow the money paid to retired public-sector employees throughout Illinois.

The Circuit
10/22/2020
The Charges

In a first-of-its-kind project, The Circuit collected and cleaned millions of records from the Clerk of the Circuit Court of Cook County's mainframe computer system. This is a detailed breakdown of more than 3 million criminal cases filed in Cook County between 2000 and 2018. That's more than 400 cases per day.

Better Government Association
12/03/2021
The Costly Toll of Dead-End Drug Arrests

Raymond Galloway, a 48-year-old line cook at a Chicago soul food restaurant, got arrested on the West Side twice this year carrying small amounts of heroin. Both times, the courts quickly tossed out his charges.

Better Government Association
05/05/2022
Illinois Pension Funds Are Slow To Pull Out of Russian Assets

Despite strong rhetoric from Gov. J.B. Pritzker and other top state officials demanding public pension funds divest more than $100 million in Russia-based assets, state lawmakers now say they won't act until the Fall veto session. A key legislative proposal to force the pullout in the wake of the Russian invasion of Ukraine died in a Senate committee awaiting a vote.

BGA/WBEZ
01/08/2018
Deadly Force Policies Ignored In Suburban Chicago

Most police department policies advise against shooting at moving cars or while other officers are in range, but such guidelines matter little to police in dangerous confrontations.

BGA/WBEZ
01/08/2018
113 Suburban Cop Shootings, Zero Discipline

They aggressively confronted the mentally ill, fired weapons during high-speed chases and shot bystanders as well as other cops. But they were never punished or retrained.