Invisible Institute

We are a nonprofit journalism production company on the South Side of Chicago. We work to enhance the capacity of citizens to hold public institutions accountable. 

Among the tactics we employ are investigative reporting, multimedia storytelling, human rights documentation, the curation of public information, and the orchestration of difficult public conversations.

Our work coheres around a central principle: we as citizens have co-responsibility with the government for maintaining respect for human rights and, when abuses occur, for demanding redress.

PROJECT HIGHLIGHT: BENEATH THE SURFACE

In 2021, we launched Beneath the Surface under the leadership of our data director trina reynolds-tyler and in partnership with Human Rights Data Reporting Group (HRDAG). Beneath the Surface uses machine learning and narrative justice to better understand how marginalized communities experience police violence. The Invisible Institute has worked to make police complaint data public for years through litigation and public release on CPDP.co, but even when complaint data is public, significant information remains inaccessible. Basic descriptive statistics about the experiences of Black women and trans people are incomplete or missing entirely from the public discourse about police violence. When someone files a complaint, although there may have been multiple allegations reported, the complaint receives a primary complaint category determined by the person intaking the complaint. A complaint may be primarily categorized as an “illegal search,” for example, when the underlying narrative also contains an allegation of sexual violence. 

In 2023, we released the first major investigation based on the data findings from Beneath the Surface. "Missing In Chicago" is a three-part investigation into how the Chicago Police Department handles missing persons cases by Invisible Institute data director trina reynolds-tyler in partnership with Sarah Conway from City Bureau. The team found that CPD often advises families to wait 24-48 hours before reporting loved ones missing – contrary to state law – and that Black Chicagoans make up the bulk of those reported missing. Black people have made up about two-thirds of all missing person cases in Chicago over the past two decades. In particular, Black girls and women between the ages of 10 and 20 make up about 30% of all missing person cases in the city, according to police data, despite comprising only 2% of the city population as of 2020. Many families felt that bias played a role in slow or insufficient police response to their cases. Finally, CPD's poor record-keeping is a major issue. In recent years, over 40% of records are missing critical data points and missing persons reports are some of the last CPD reports still kept on paper.

RECENT REPORTING

IMPACT HIGHLIGHTS

The impact of our work is not always immediate. 

• Since the publication of Jamie Kalven’s investigation, “Code of Silence,” in 2016, Cook County has overturned more than 212 convictions linked to former CPD-sergeant Ronald Watts–the largest mass exonerations in Cook County history. “Code of Silence” also precipitated the firing of Ernest Brown, 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. 

• Five years after Alison Flowers and a co-author published a Chicago Reader investigative story about how Illinois’ felony murder law can obscure police misconduct, a bill that passed in 2021 amended the state’s damaging and expansive felony murder statute. Restore Justice Illinois advocated for the reform, relying heavily on Invisible Institute reporting to argue its merits.

• The Invisible Institute launched the Civic Police Data Project in 2015, which makes hundreds of thousands of Chicago Police complaints available to the public. Seven years after its launch, the site continues to be used by over 89,000 Chicagoans each year, including public defenders and reporters who use it to support their day-to-day work. Some of its highest traffic came in 2020 when Chicagoans relied on the tool to look up officers during protests after the murder of George Floyd.

FROM THE ARCHIVE

The Chicago Police Torture Archive is a human rights documentation of former Commander Jon Burge’s violence against more than 100 Black men, from the 1970s-1990s. The journalistic centerpiece of this site are the profiles of police torture survivors, most of whom were represented by the People’s Law Office of Chicago.

Tortured by police in 1988, Marvin Reeves served 21 years in prison until declared innocent and released in 2009.

On September 11, 2013, the Chicago City Council approved settlements of $6.15 million each in wrongful conviction lawsuits by Marvin Reeves and his fellow torture victim Ronald Kitchen.  

Later the same day, Mayor Rahm Emanuel issued the city’s first official apology for a 40-year history of torture and coverup, most notoriously by former Cmdr. Jon Burge and his detectives, calling it “a stain on the city’s reputation.”

Reeves’ ordeal began on August 26, 1988. At the time he was a 29-year-old father, an alley mechanic and sometime tow truck driver, living on the South Side with his girlfriend, who was pregnant with a son who Reeves wouldn’t see for two decades. “I found I was able to make honest money, pay my bills and feed my kids,” Reeves said in an interview with the Invisible Institute in 2017. “It was an honest job that paid an honest dollar.”

A permanent memorial to honor survivors of Burge police torture is currently in process. Stay up to date on the permanent memorial process by following the work of the Chicago Torture Justice Memorials Foundation.

Landing page photo by Patricia Evans (1993) in the Ida B Wells homes, during the last chapter of Chicago's high-rise public housing. Read more about the Ida B Wells homes in the Code of Silence.

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