Vol. 3 Issue 36
Missing in Chicago featured in City Council hearing
Sarah Conway of City Bureau and our director of data Trina Reynolds-Tyler testify at Chicago City Council public safety committee hearing on missing and murdered women. October 23, 2024
A Note from executive director Andrew Fan on the impact of "Missing in Chicago"
On October 23rd, I had the chance to watch my colleague Trina Reynolds-Tyler testify in front of Chicago City Council’s Public Safety Committee, presenting on the key findings of her Missing in Chicago investigation alongside Sarah Conway of City Bureau.
Sarah and Trina were not alone. CBS reporter Dorothy Tucker and members of organizations like KOCO, Mothers Against Violence Everywhere, Ernestine’s Daughter, and GoodKidsMadCity all presented. Bridgette Rouse, whose sister Sonya went missing in 2016, flew in the night before to make sure she could speak about her sister’s disappearance and her experience with the Chicago Police.
The wide range of people who care about missing Chicagoans and the depth of their commitment to change was impossible to ignore.
The Chicago Police appeared to take note. At the hearing, CPD Commander Jarrod Smith announced a series of changes to the department’s missing persons policies, including finally digitizing the missing persons form, one of the last CPD records kept solely on paper.
That did not satisfy the council members, though, who peppered Smith with questions about staffing levels and data quality. At one point, an alder sharply noted that Trina had answers to basic questions about open cases that they expected CPD to be able to answer. They pushed for CPD to bring more experts and information at the next meeting.
Afterwards, Trina told me how encouraged she was by the alders’ clear engagement, comparing the spirited questioning to a 2017 hearing where council members accepted the department’s assurances about missing person investigations largely without questions.
Trina’s testimony came amid a whirlwind week – she nearly missed her flight to New York to accept the Pulitzer Prize because the hearing ran long – but the fact that it happened at all is a testament to our team’s patient and persistent approach to reporting.
In the year since we published “Missing in Chicago,” we’ve held reading groups for Chicagoans and gatherings for the families of missing persons. Trina and Sarah spoke at groups around the city, from tech meetups to West Side churches. We printed and distributed thousands of copies of the story.
And community groups have continued to organize. This summer, KOCO held the 7th annual We Walk for Her march, advocating for missing Black women and girls.
As journalists, we always want our work to have an impact, to improve people’s lives. At the hearing, we saw how reporting like trina’s can lift up community concerns, uncover flawed and harmful systems, and ultimately, begin to shift our collective priorities for the better.
Looking ahead to 2025, we are committed to continuing our impactful investigative work, including new stories drawing on our Beneath the Surface project. And, we’re excited to have added reporting capacity on the team: María Inés Zamudio has joined us as a three-year reporting fellow in partnership with ProPublica, and Isabelle Senechal is with us for a year as a transparency fellow from Medill. You can meet them and the rest of our team at this year’s Supporters Convening, in-person on November 19th at the Chicago Athletic Association and virtually on December 3rd. I hope to see you there.
Andrew Fan
Read our reporting on the missing women & girls hearing in the Chicago Reader.
In light of the election results, we are reminded of advice Jamie Kalven shared in an interview with the Chicago Reader in December 2016:
“All over the world there are people in repressive settings who find ways to live as free human beings, act in solidarity with their neighbors, and fashion strategies to resist state power. We’re going to need to get good at practicing that kind of politics.
“One of the dangers is that people will instead become demoralized and retreat into denial, that they will seek refuge amid the pleasures and fulfillments of private life. That would give carte blanche to power. There was a term used in central Europe to describe those who opted to retreat into private life under totalitarianism. They were called 'internal emigres.' That is certainly tempting at a time like this: to live one’s life in the wholly private realm, enjoying the company of friends, good food and drink, the pleasures of literature and music, and so on. Privileged sectors of our society are already heavily skewed that way. It’s a real danger at a time like this. If we withdraw from public engagement now, we aid and abet that which we deplore.”
As we prepare for this next chapter of national politics, we encourage you to recommit to public engagement, with us and beyond.
Join us for our Annual Supporters Convening!
Join us on Tuesday, November 19th from 6:00 - 8:00pm for our annual supporters convening at Chicago Athletic Association's Stagg Court. This gathering will be a chance to celebrate and reflect on our work over the past year and share a glimpse of what is to come.
This year has been a time of critical new investigations and data work. From the release of a major update to our Civic Police Data Project, to celebrating our two Pulitzer Prize winning investigations, Missing in Chicago and You Didn't See Nothin, and our ongoing storytelling work with young Chicagoans. We are eager to share updates with you over delicious refreshments.
If you’re unable to join us in Chicago, we hope you’ll attend our virtual Supporters Convening on Tuesday, December 3rd at 2:00pm CT. Thank you for your continued support of our work. We look forward to seeing you soon.
Register at https://invisible.institute/events
10 years ago, on October 20, 2014, Laquan McDonald was murdered by Chicago Police officer Jason Van Dyke, who shot the 17-year-old sixteen times. Months later, Jamie Kalven published a story with the autopsy that questioned the official narrative, and a year later, the city released dash cam footage that sparked mass protest, a Department of Justice investigation, and a cascade of hard fought police reforms, despite the Trump administration’s attempts to end police consent decrees at the time.
Jamie reflected on the growth of transparency and stalled reforms in the past decade in an op-ed for the Chicago Tribune, and spoke with ABC7 and WGN for their reporting on the anniversary.
Since the launch of the National Police Index in late September, our reporter Sam Stecklow has published stories in Missouri, Massachusetts, Montana, Alabama, New Hampshire, and Utah to explain the state of police transparency and how it impacts their inclusion in the tool.
Journalists in Michigan, Colorado, Utah, Virginia, and New York reported on police transparency in their states, too, using the newly accessible data from the National Police Index for their reporting.
Learn More →
In a new piece for Acacia Magazine, Maira Khwaja, our executive editor of the Chicago Police Torture Archive, writes of the international connections of torture in "An Ecosystem of Violence."
From the Vietnam War and it's direct influence on the torture practices of Jon Burge to the photos of men at Abu Ghraib to the ongoing occupation of Palestine, Maira illuminates the ways exceptionalism can allow torture to continue and how collective consciousness can move us towards change. Read more →
This month, This American Life released an episode focused on parole, with reporting by Bill Healy and Ben Austen that began at the Invisible Institute. “This is the Case of Henry Dee” tells the story of how thirteen parole board members decide whether or not one man should be released from prison. During Ben Austen’s time as a fellow at Invisible Institute, Bill and Ben began their work together on The Parole Room, an 8-episode podcast series out now on Audible. Ben’s book, Correction, is available now.
Incident, the short documentary film analyzing the body camera footage of the killing of Harith Augustus, has been nominated for the 2024 Critics Choice Doc Awards and shortlisted for the DOC NYC and Cinema Eye awards, among others. The film, directed by Bill Morrison and distributed by The New Yorker, was co-produced by Jamie Kalven.
Incident has a Chicago screening at Gene Siskel Film Center on December 9, 6:15pm
Isra Rahman began as a college intern with the Invisible institute in 2017, and in the years since has played a key role in our data expansion work across Illinois. As she concludes her work with us to begin law school, she shares a reflection with us on her time at the Invisible Institute:
"For the past year and a half I have been grappling with the ways the Kalven v. Chicago precedent allows for police misconduct documents in and around Illinois to be public. Making these documents public via CPDP.co doesn’t mean that misconduct ends, but perhaps this tool may reaffirm people’s daily experiences with police and mobilize collective action. Our work in Champaign-Urbana, Joliet, and Chicago the past year has evolved and been informed by the strength of our relationships with people and the necessary act of building trust in order to understand the different ways police operate in communities separate from our own." Read more→
