Two figures instrumental in fighting for sunlight in the Laquan McDonald shooting, Craig Futterman of the University of Chicago Law School and Jamie Kalven of the Invisible Institute, wrote last December about an alarming pattern in Chicago … They went on to explain that “in Kalven v. Chicago, the Illinois Appellate Court held that documents bearing on allegations of police abuse are public information,” and that the Emanuel administration adopted a new transparency policy as a result—but that the Kalven decision “is limited to closed police misconduct cases; it doesn’t cover ongoing investigations,” even though public interest in police-killing investigations “is far more intense at the time of the shooting than one or two years later when the case is closed and public attention has turned elsewhere.”

t is shameful that it took a court ruling to prompt Emanuel to be honest with the public about closed cases and doubly shameful that it took another lawsuit to force this week’s release. How much better would Chicago’s police department be if the resources spent fighting to hide bad behavior had been spent on making it less frequent?

In the graphic video seen across the country Tuesday, Chicago police officer Jason Van Dyke levels his gun toward Laquan McDonald, an African American teen carrying a knife and veering away from the officer. Van Dyke shoots. McDonald spins, then falls to the ground as Van Dyke continues to fire every bullet in his clip — 16 shots in all.

The officer was charged Tuesday with first degree murder in the Oct. 20, 2014, shooting, which prosecutors say was an “improper use of deadly force.” That night protesters in Chicago streamed through downtown toward police department headquarters, chanting “16 shots.”

Van Dyke, a white 14-year veteran of Chicago’s police force, has been accused of misconduct 17 times before, according to data from the University of Chicago and the journalism non-profit Invisible Institute. The database, published less than a week before the announcement that Van Dyke would be prosecuted, details tens of thousands of complaints against Chicago police officers that weren’t previously made public. Fewer than five percent of the allegations resulted in disciplinary actions for the officers; none of the 18 complaints against Van Dyke led to a penalty.

Despite the fact that McDonald’s family did not file a lawsuit, the city paid them $5 million in April and fought to conceal the video, even after The Wall Street Journal, the Chicago Tribune and a freelance journalist all filedFOIA requests for its release. Van Dyke remains on paid desk duty as the shooting is investigated by the FBI and the United States Attorney’s Office in Chicago.

For more, we are joined by Jamie Kalven, founder of the Invisible Institute, a nonprofit journalism outlet that recently released tens of thousands of pages of civilian complaints filed against the Chicago Police Department—97 percent of which resulted in absolutely no disciplinary action. Kalven is also the freelance journalist who uncovered Laquan McDonald’s autopsy report.

But data recently obtained by the Civic Police Data Project show that there are quite a few bad officers in the Chicago Police Department, many of whom have exhibited patterns of misconduct without punishment. University of Chicago Law School professor Craig Futterman and the Invisible Institute, a journalism nonprofit, has published visualizations of the Chicago police misconduct data, including a set that names police officers who’ve been the subject of complaints, how many complaints each has received, and how often they’ve been disciplined.

The biggest takeaway is that it appears from the data that Chicago cops are rarely punished, even when found culpable for the misconduct they’re accused of. Van Dyke was the subject of 17 citizen complaints in the years before he killed McDonald, though he was not penalized for any of them. The data profile below, also from Futterman’s project, shows another police officer, Raymond Piwincki, who’s had 68 complaints filed against him, but has only been penalized twice.

A massive database of complaints against Chicago police has been published. With 55,000 rows of data it provides an unprecedented and historic look into how the City of Chicago polices its communities and its officers. The city fought long and hard to keep the information secret.

The legal battle over the complaints started in the 1990s when Jamie Kalven, a quixotic journalist, writer and social worker, started spending time in Stateway Gardens. Kalven had an unofficial office in a ground floor apartment in the building. Now, Kalven looks at the new buildings and a park with a curving walking path and long prairie grasses. 

“This is not the community I worked in,” he says. “I wish it well but it’s something else.”