Vol. 3 Issue 1
Jamie Kalven introduces View from the Ground Vol. 3
Vigil Against Violence at Stateway Gardens, 1994, Photo: Patricia Evans
Today the Invisible Institute initiates a new monthly newsletter under a familiar title: The View From The Ground. This is the third incarnation of The View. The first (2001-2007) was a human rights reporting project based at the Stateway Gardens public housing development during the “transformation” of Chicago’s high-rise public housing. The second (2017-2019), rebooted in the aftermath of the political upheaval caused by the police murder of Laquan McDonald, took the form of an occasional round-up of criminal justice news. The current View will provide updates on Invisible Institute projects and work-in-progress.
There is a certain poetry in the fact that we have occasion today to report on a major development in our campaign to dismantle official secrecy with respect to police misconduct investigations—a campaign we undertook together with the Mandel Legal Aid Clinic of the University of Chicago Law School—that was first noted in The View thirteen years ago.
On June 18, the Illinois Supreme Court ruled that a provision in the collective bargaining agreement between the Fraternal Order of Police (FOP) and the City of Chicago requiring police misconduct files to be destroyed after five years violates Illinois public policy.
After the state appellate court held in Kalven v. Chicago (2014) that investigations of police misconduct are public information in Illinois, FOP mounted a legal counter-attack on the precedent, seeking to limit its scope. Last week the Supreme Court finally put the matter to rest. A ChicagoSun-Times editorial celebrating the decision quotes our longtime collaborator Craig Futterman of the Mandel Clinic, who co-wrote an amicus brief in the case with Chaclyn Hunt of the Invisible Institute. The decision, he says, is “truly momentous.”
Momentous, yes. And also prelude to the next phase in our campaign. Had FOP prevailed, the result would have been akin to burning down a library containing an irreplaceable human rights archive. Yet it remains the case today that a citizen who wants to access particular documents in that library must do so via the inefficient Rube Goldberg apparatus of the Freedom of Information Act. What is called for now, at this watershed moment in our history, is to throw the doors of the library open to the public.
The means to do this exist. Earlier this year, in Green v. Chicago Police Department, a 2015 lawsuit brought in support of our work, a judge ordered the City of Chicago to produce all closed police misconduct investigations back to 1967—roughly 175,000 files, some of them hundreds of pages long.
The city is appealing the ruling. The public should demand that it embrace this opportunity. As I have argued elsewhere, a commitment to make these documents public would transcend “transparency”—that strangely antiseptic word—and constitute an unprecedented acknowledgement of the history of apartheid justice from which we are struggling to break free.
Made public and curated by the Citizens Police Data Project, this archive would be the functional equivalent of tens of thousands of citizens stepping forward to testify before a Truth and Reconciliation Commission.
In recent years, the Invisible Institute has come to be known for investigative reporting: for exposing what is hidden. In light of our work on the Laquan McDonald case and the Watts scandal, that is understandable, but it misstates our mission. From the start and with deepening clarity over time, the work, as we understand it, is to make visible that which is in plain sight but not seen.
On a previously unimaginable scale, the coronavirus pandemic has done precisely that, overwhelming our habits of denial and illuminating realities on the ground. Surely the galvanizing impact of the George Floyd atrocity is due to the fact that the pandemic laid bare conditions of structural racism, thereby providing the context in which the killing of Floyd was perceived and understood.
The challenge now is to keep that portal of perception open, to widen it, and to advance the process by which individual knowledge of human rights abuses is transformed into public acknowledgement of a shared reality.
Jamie Kalven
June 25, 2020
Somebody, our seven-part podcast series, departs from the conventions of investigative podcasts, typically hosted by reporters, by centering the voice of Shapearl Wells, a mother who investigated the 2016 murder of her 22-year-old son Courtney Copeland with the help of the Invisible Institute. Shapearl is the narrator of the series, its protagonist and central voice.
At our first meeting, Shapearl arrived at our office armed with a large stack of documents related to Courtney’s murder. For the better part of an hour, she spoke about the case with quiet authority and a deep ground note of emotion, while effortlessly plucking from the pile of papers on the table in front of her the particular document she needed to illustrate the point she was making.
What struck us, above all, was her awareness of what she knew and what she didn’t know, what she could prove and what she could only speculate about, coupled with her fierce determination as a mother to learn everything she could possibly learn about her son’s death.
Three years later, the podcast was released in an unexpected environment, mere days after the COVID-19 crisis shut down society. The crisis shifted our collective consciousness. As many struggled to come to terms with the reality of so many fellow citizens dying alone, Shapearl’s quest to fully comprehend the last moments of her son’s life took on added resonance.
Since its release in March, the podcast has been reported on by, among others, Vogue, People Magazine, Oxygen, the Chicago Reader, and the South Side Weekly.
In a recently-releasedbonus episode, Jamie and Shapearl talk about the civil resistance across the nation in recent weeks and their hopes that this moment might translate to fundamental change.
Listen at SomebodyPodcast.com or wherever you get your podcasts:
Apple Podcasts | Spotify | iHeart Radio | Google Play | Stitcher
Barely three months after the CPD instituted new rules around the use of batons, our reporting by Andrew Fan and Dana Brozost-Kelleher on recent protests documented 83 baton strikes on at least 32 different people by officers, most captured on video. Nearly all appear to violate the new policy.
Citizens Police Data Project has been a key resource for protesters on the ground in Chicago, who use it to look up officer names and badge numbers. We are responding to interest in CPDP from across the country, as it is being held up as a model for how public data about policing should function.
In response to the moment, SHOWTIME has made 16 Shots, the Peabody Award-nominated documentary on the Laquan McDonald case we co-produced, available for free on multiple platforms.
