Been making incremental improvements to my mapping database of Chicago traffic crashes, including this page dedicated to fatalities.

Right now I’m going off the records marked as fatal according to the city’s traffic crashes portal. When the city erroneously includes fatalities, such as from drive-by shootings, I manually redact them as I catch them.

However, when someone dies after being initially reported as injured — such as Gerardo Marciales in 2022, I’ve been told by a city records officer that the crashes portal record is often not updated with the amended report.

They did point me to a separate public portal — the Vision Zero Chicago Traffic Fatalities — that’s meant to be a more canonical record of fatalities. I’ll figure out a way to reconcile the systems in the near future so that crashstop’s traffic stats reflect the true number of deaths. I estimate there are around 20 or so that are currently uncounted because of their unupdated statuses.