June 30, 2022
Champaign County Sheriff’s Sergeant Norman “JR” Meeker had a 10-year history of disciplinary violations, including destruction of personal property, contract violations, a Tik Tok account that shared bodycam videos of crime scenes, and mountains of missed paperwork.
This investigation, by Sam Stecklow and Dylan Tiger, relied on records obtained from the Champaign County Sheriff through multiple Freedom of Information Act requests. For several years now, we have been making similar requests of police departments across the country, and lately we’ve been making requests with a specific focus on Illinois.
Our police misconduct data tool, CPDP.co, is built on records from the Chicago Police Department obtained through lengthy and ongoing litigation. By transforming massive spreadsheets and poorly copied police reports into a deceptively simple tool, we have supported the accountability efforts of lawyers, community organizers, and other investigative journalists. We have demonstrated the way accessible public information can drive change.
Importantly, in 2014, when the Illinois Appellate court declared Chicago police misconduct records to be public information, that ruling applied to every police officer’s record across the entire state of Illinois. And while unconstitutional policing often looks similar - illegally breaking into homes, deploying police canines as weapons, frisking people without reasonable suspicion, fatally shooting children - the types of data local departments keep is wildly varied and not consistently stored.
Most local journalism outlets no longer have the necessary resources to spend months tracking down and making sense of the data - but we have already been doing it, and we want to share. We know that a simplified, mobile-focused version of CPDP supported by vigorous reporting would assist local communities who are trying to understand the complex nature of policing in their neighborhoods.
Today, we are publicly announcing our Open Data team's expansion to deploy our unique style of transparency and investigative reporting throughout Illinois. As we expand into smaller jurisdictions in Illinois, our FOIA and open data practice will fuel both our own reporting and the efforts of our collaborators and their communities.
This approach builds on how our team worked with reporters from IndyStar to investigate police dogs in Indianapolis. Our team used our experience with FOIA, data analysis, and police policies to partner with local reporters with deep networks and experience in their communities. The collaboration produced an investigation that led to major policy changes in the police department and won the Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting.
Now our team is excited to partner with reporters like Dylan, from CU-CitizenAccess, to report on policing and make data available in the cities of Urbana and Champaign. In the coming months we hope to work with more cities in Illinois and to continue to learn from our local partners.
A few weeks ago, we took our first reporting trip to Champaign-Urbana, where we met with journalists, community organizers, formerly incarcerated people, court-watchers, academics, and mental health professionals. We asked them the same question we’ve been asking youth in Chicago for ten years: how do your police treat you, and how does that make you feel?
We spend this time investing in local relationships because there are specificities that can only be known through lived experience. We’re not just looking for investigative leads; we’re listening for how to obtain and publish information most useful to the community being policed. As we grow, we will be adapting our practice to ensure that we are producing work that is relevant and useful to people working for systemic change.
There might be far less data to work with, but the fundamental violence of unconstitutional policing is the same. And without access to the data, communities will be at a disadvantage when advocating for change. Our investigations are not just to reveal injustice, but to enable people to robustly participate in the civic infrastructure of progress.
Andrew Fan and Chaclyn Hunt
Open Data Team