Investigations

Our team of reporters produces in-depth investigations that draw on our experience with public records, police datasets, and wrongful convictions. The following is a list of some of our major projects. We frequently collaborate with other organizations and publish our work through partnerships with outlets like The Intercept, the Chicago Reader, USA Today, and the South Side Weekly.

Missing in Chicago

Missing in Chicago is our two-year investigation, alongside City Bureau, into Chicago Police handling of missing persons cases. Our director of data trina reynolds-tyler and City Bureau reporter Sarah Conway discovered the CPD prematurely closed at least four missing persons cases where the victim was murdered or never located. These cases are indicative of a much larger issue: many families report that contrary to state law, officers forced them to delay filing missing persons reports and that racial bias contributed to indifferent police responses to their cases. Black Chicagoans make up three-quarters of those reported missing, and because of CPD’s poor record-keeping, over 40% of recent missing persons cases are missing critical data points.

This investigation emerges directly from trina’s groundbreaking Beneath the Surface project, which uses community-driven machine learning to investigate police misconduct.

Reporting Work in Champaign-Urbana

Drawing from the lessons we learned through the Citizens Police Data Project (CPDP), the Invisible Institute is expanding our open data work to several other cities in Illinois. Our pilot program is in Urbana and Champaign – two neighboring mid-sized cities in central Illinois. In early 2023, we launched the beta site champaign.cpdp.co, our first police data tool outside of Chicago.

Along with accessing, cleaning, and making police complaint and use of force data public, our reporting team has partnered with local journalism outlets in Urbana and Champaign (including CU-CitizenAccess, Illinois Public Media , Illinois Newsroom and The Public i). Our sustained investigations and conversations within these cities continue to reveal systemic issues with police accountability and excessive uses of force. Thus far, we have published a story about the police misconduct of a Champaign County Sheriff’s sergeant, an investigation into the police response to mental health cases and involuntary commitment, an investigation into a pattern of excessive use of force and the failure of accountability systems within the Urbana Police Department, and police’s continued violations of department policies surrounding domestic violence calls.

The Police Killing of Cortez Bufford

The first installment of this investigation, "The Fatal Tunnel: A Police Killing in St. Louis Remains Shrouded in Darkness" was published in partnership with The Intercept in May 2021, and republished locally in The Riverfront Times. The investigation also appeared as an audio story "Killed in the Darkness," in the podcast Intercepted. “Fatal Tunnel” probes the 2019 police killing of 24-year-old Cortez Bufford, who was shot six times, front and back, between two homes. It began as a “pedestrian check” by a roving hotspot unit of the St. Louis Metro Police Department. The officer drew his weapon almost immediately, then chased Bufford until he dead-ended in a pitch black gangway. Five years before his death, Bufford was brutalized by St. Louis police officers in an assault caught on camera during a routine traffic stop. The story made national news at the time. Bufford’s assault by St. Louis police occurred four months before Michael Brown’s death in Ferguson. Bufford's death preceded the slaying of George Floyd by five months, book-ending his case within the larger national conversation around race and policing.

The police officer who shot Bufford has his own traumatic backstory. Nine years ago, he was shot by a suspect during a traffic stop and almost died. He received the Superintendent’s Medal of Valor and was named Officer of the Year by his colleagues. Since then, this officer has had a troubling record of complaints alleging abusive interactions with Black citizens. What further distinguishes the piece is our exploration of a larger theme: the interaction of the parallel traumas of officers and those they police. In this case, two traumatized individuals collided in the darkness of a narrow gangway with catastrophic results. Additionally, St. Louis is the U.S. city with the highest rate of police killings, yet at the time of our reporting, it had a backlog of more than 20 cases like Bufford's that have received no determination from the Circuit Attorney's Office.

Months after publishing "The Fatal Tunnel," we published a follow-up story with new findings in the case in The Riverfront Times: Blood Moon: A Forensic Investigation of a St. Louis Police Killing.

Mauled: When Police Dogs Bite

In 2020, our team partnered with The Marshall Project, Indy Star, and AL.com on an investigation into racial disparities in police dog attacks. In 2021 the story was awarded with a Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting.

Chicago Police Files

In 2018, the Invisible Institute partnered with The Intercept on a series of stories about the Chicago Police Department. Our series included several stories that broke new ground in using data analysis to reveal how misconduct spreads through the ranks and the vast racial disparities in CPD use of force. The series also included several major investigations. One story examined unanswered questions around the shooting of a disabled Black teenager named Ricky Hayes. Another investigation connected then-CPD superintendent Eddie Johnson to a string of notorious police shootings, including the killing of Rekia Boyd, an unarmed Black woman shot by CPD officer Dante Servin in 2012. As a result of this story, several leading mayoral candidates called for Johnson to be replaced. This series was a finalist for a Lisagor Award – Chicago’s top journalism honor – for best feature series.

Chicago Police Use of Force at Protests

Our team investigated the Chicago Police Department’s use of force against protesters in the weeks after the police killing of George Floyd. Using videos and narratives, including dozens submitted by members of the public, we documented more than 80 baton strikes by CPD officers, nearly all of which appear to violate the department’s own rules. Our reporting was published in the Chicago Reader and the South Side Weekly.

Somebody podcast 

Somebody is the story of Shapearl Wells, whose 22-year old son Courtney Copeland was murdered in 2016. Frustrated by the failure of the police to vigorously investigate the murder, she undertook to do so herself and eventually reached out to the Invisible Institute for help. An Invisible Institute team led by Alison Flowers joined in her search for answers. Somebody is the story of what they learned. The series was produced in collaboration with First Look Media’s Topic Studios and distributed by iHeartRadio. 

Robert Johnson Investigation

Published in partnership with The Daily Beast, The Invisible Institute conducted a yearlong investigation into the wrongful conviction of an Illinois prisoner named Robert Johnson. Despite little substantive evidence, Johnson, a Black Chicago teenager, was sentenced to 80 years in prison for a 1996 murder, home invasion and robbery. While Johnson languished in prison for the last 24 years, James O’Brien, a lead detective in his case, enjoyed a long, decorated career despite ties to notorious CPD commander Jon Burge and a reputation for targeting Black boys. The Invisible Institute connected O’Brien to at least 59 allegations of physical abuse, torture, coercion, and manipulating evidence, almost all of them of young, Black and Brown men. Our reporting on this case has uncovered a mountain of new evidence that strongly points to Johnson’s innocence—and police misconduct as a major contributing factor to his conviction.

The Killing of Harith Augustus 

The Invisible Institute, in collaboration with the London-based human rights group Forensic Architecture, undertook to investigate and reconstruct the 2018 police killing of Harith Augustus, a South Shore barber, in a project commissioned by the 2019 Chicago Architecture Biennial. The resulting exhibition interrogates the legal principle that officers are compelled to make "split-second decisions," and great deference must be shown to their perceptions of risk and judgments within the split- second. It does so employing six short video-investigations of the Augustus killing, each of which reconstructs the event across a different time scale—from milliseconds to years—exposing various factors that contributed to the fatal encounter. 

Tarnished Brass Project 

Our reporters partnered with USA Today to produce the Tarnished Brass project, creating the first national database of decertified police officers, with more than 30,000 records. The data supported reporting that found that thousands of people have faced criminal charges or gone to prison based in part on testimony from law enforcement officers deemed to have credibility problems by their bosses or by prosecutors. Our reporters also used the data to investigate how Louisiana reformed its police decertification system after Baton Rouge officers killed Alton Sterling, but how the new system misses most of the officers it is supposed to catch.

Code of Silence 

Jamie Kalven's four-part, 20,000-word article “Code of Silence” exposed official indifference to the criminal activities of a team of corrupt Chicago Police Department officers operating in public housing on the South Side of Chicago.

Since its publication in The Intercept in late 2016, “Code” has contributed to the exonerations of 75 individuals and precipitated the firing of the former deputy superintendent of CPD from his post as executive director of Homeland Security for Cook County. It has prompted multiple ongoing official investigations, including one by the Department of Justice, into what will almost surely prove to be one of the biggest scandals in CPD history.