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 continued reporting work on Chicago police misconduct, we are eager to share updates with you over delicious refreshments.

Thank you for your continued support of our work, we look forward to seeing you soon.

Join us on Tuesday, August 13th at 6:00pm at Haymarket House for the launch of CPDP 3.0.

Currently, the site is home to nearly a quarter million misconduct records on Chicago police officers from 1988 - 2018. This update will add tens of thousands of new records, including new complaints and use of force data from 2019-2023. We are also adding police settlement data for the first time, displaying nearly $500 million in payments made by the city to settle police misconduct.

We invite you to join us at this launch event to hear more about the tool, engage with the new data, and discover ways this information can be used during the DNC, within your neighborhood, and more.

Join us on Tuesday, April 30th at 6:30pm at Chicago Art Department to explore and discuss our investigation “Missing in Chicago”.

There will be opportunity to explore the images and video created alongside the investigation, to read police complaint narratives, discuss together solutions, and to hear from co-reporters trina and Sarah on updates since the release of the investigation.

Please register in advance. 

Join the University of Chicago’s Forum for Free Inquiry and Expression, the Center for the Study of Race, Politics, and Culture; and WTTW, and the Logan Center for the Arts for a panel discussion on the life and legacy of Ida B. Wells.

About the event: After her newspaper in Memphis, Free Speech, was destroyed, Ida B. Wells moved to Chicago, where she became a crusader against lynching and an advocate for women’s rights. One of the greatest civil rights leaders of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, her legacy of activism continues to this day.

Speakers and performers include:
● Adam Green, Associate Professor of History at the University of Chicago
● Aislinn Pulley, Executive Director of Chicago Torture Justice Center
● Anwuli Anigbo, Development Director at the Invisible Institute
● Dan Duster, Motivational Speaker and Ida B. Wells' great-grandson
● Jamila Woods, poet
● Morgan Elise Johnson, Co-founder and Publisher at The TRiiBE
● Natalie Moore, WBEZ journalist, author, and playwright
● Paula J. Giddings, Elizabeth A. Woodson Professor Emerita of Africana Studies at Smith College

This event is co-presented by The Chicago Forum for Free Inquiry and Expression, the Center for the Study of Race, Politics & Culture, and The Reva and David Logan Center for the Arts, in partnership with WTTW. Reception included.

Attendees who would like to learn more about Ida B. Wells before the event are invited to view the WTTW Chicago Stories special on Ida B. Wells either on your own at wttw.com/idabwells or at the Logan Center Screening Room on Thursday, March 21st at 5 pm.

Lead support for the Chicago Forum’s Zell Speaker and Event Series comes from the Zell Family Foundation.

On Friday, February 23rd at 1:00pm CST, join the Trauma Interest Work Group for a conversation on safety. Jamie Kalven will be joined by Adam Green and Tre Nowaczynski. This event is hybrid.

Register here for in person at Mansueto Lounge (1155 E. 60th Street, room 101) (lunch provided)

Register here for Zoom conversation

“What Does Safety Mean to You? Community Perspectives on Safety Speaker Series” curates a set of forums that explores the various meanings of safety. We will explore policies, practices, and attitudes within their historical and current contexts, affecting the University of Chicago campus and our surrounding communities. All voices and perspectives will be welcome and valued. 

The Trauma Interest Work Group (TIWG) promotes the scientific, interdisciplinary understanding of trauma; and works to improve equity and justice on the South Side of Chicago and beyond. We do this through education, scholarship, clinical care, community engagement, and advocacy.
This event is co-sponsored with the Center for the Study of Race, Politics, & Culture

Adam Green, Associate Professor, Departments of Race, Diaspora and Indigeneity, History and the College. Chair, RDI Curriculum Committee. Co-Chair, Council on University Community Relations, University of Chicago

Jamie Kalven, Author and journalist; Founder, the Invisible Institute. Recipient of the 2017 Hillman Prize for Web Journalism for “Code of Silence” for The Intercept.

Tre Nowaczynski, Pediatric Violence Recovery Specialist III, Violence Recovery Program, Urban Health Initiative, The University of Chicago Medicine 

Join Media Burn Archive on Thursday, Nov. 9 at 6pm CT for a screening of Bill Morrison’s new short film Incident, followed by a q&a with Morrison and Jamie Kalven.

Although Morrison is best known for films that excavate old, discarded footage to reveal forgotten histories and ancient, uncannily beautiful images such as Decasia (2002) and Dawson City: Frozen Time (2017), Incident is as timely and urgent as any other work of 2023. The video is just as much a work of media archaeology as any of Morrison’s previous celluloid-based efforts, with Morrison creating a compilation that examines all available footage from the “incident” of the title: on July 14, 2018, Chicago police officer Dillan Halley shot local barber Harith Augustus five times, leaving him to die in the street. Halley would claim the shooting was self-defense and received a 2-day suspension for failing to activate his body camera.

Using only audio and video taken from the scene, Morrison reconstructs the crime and its aftermath, in which rationalizations, misunderstandings, and lies quickly set in among both police officers and witnesses. 

After the screening, Morrison will be in conversation with Jamie Kalven, the founder of Invisible Institute, whose reporting was essential to challenging the official police narrative of Augustus’s killing, as well as the police killing of Laquan McDonald.

On July 14, 2018, 37-year-old Harith Augustus, a local barber, was shot to death by police patrolling 71st Street in Chicago’s South Shore neighborhood. In partnership with Forensic Architecture, we released an investigation that contested the police narrative in 2019.

This year, filmmaker Bill Morrison released his latest work, Incident, which chronicles the death of Harith Augustus entirely through the use of surveillance camera and body cam footage from police officers. Morrison drew on our team's reporting in creating this work.

On Sunday, November 5th at 7:00pm, Chicago Humanities Festival will screen Incident at the Logan Center. Following the screening will be a panel discussion including Bill Morrison, Adam Green, and Invisible Institute's Jamie Kalven and trina reynolds-tyler. Tickets are available through CHF's website. We encourage you to revisit our reporting.

Invisible Institute journalist Sam Stecklow, along with other journalists and a public records attorney, will discuss a nationwide project to obtain police certification and employment history data in every state. The project has led to multiple legal appeals, and where data has been released (in over 30 states), journalists have begun to use the data to investigate issues of "wandering officers" who commit misconduct at one department and then find a job at another. The panelists will discuss techniques for multi-state FOIA projects, legal issues they have faced in obtaining the data, and the future for the project.

This summit is hosted by the National Freedom of Information Coalition. The NFOIC is a national nonprofit, nonpartisan organization. The NFOIC organization and members protect our right to open government by ensuring state and local governments and public institutions have laws, policies and procedures to facilitate press and public access to information and proceedings.

Purchase tickets and register here. This is an online summit.

Who goes missing in Chicago? And what happens next to help families find their loved ones? Missing person cases have drawn both local and national attention to how police handle these cases. This August, City Bureau and the Invisible Institute will publish an investigative story about how Chicago police handle missing person cases and the impact on families.

Reporters Trina Reynolds-Tyler, Invisible Institute, and Sarah Conway, City Bureau, found that Black people have made up two-thirds of all missing person cases reported to the Chicago Police Department over the last 20 years. 57% of these cases are for Black children under the age of 21.

Join City Bureau and the Invisible Institute to learn more about the prevalence of missing Black teens and short and long-term solutions for this systemic problem, including resources, prevention, and the decriminalization of survival work. 

Join the Chicago Council of Lawyers and the American Constitution Society – Chicago Lawyers Chapter on Thursday, July 20, 2023 for our Annual Police Accountability Forum, streaming online at CollaborationForJustice.org.

They will discuss the state of policing, oversight, and reform in Chicago with Sharon Fairley, Professor from Practice at the University of Chicago Law School, as moderator.

Confirmed speakers include Deborah Witzburg, Inspector General for the City of Chicago, Andrea Kersten, Chief Administrator of the Civilian Office of Police Accountability, Jamie Kalven of the Invisible Institute, Remel Terry of the Chicago Community Commission for Public Safety and Accountability, and Arewa Karen Winters of the District Council in the 15th Police District.

Join us on Friday, July 7th from 4:00 - 6:00pm for a summer celebration at Promontory Point. We are eager to share a moment with community to reflect on our work over the past year and share a preview of what's to come. 

Central to our practice is the act of conversation and convivality. We are thankful for deep connection to our community and the ways in which extended and complex conversations with those around us continually informs our way of thinking. We hope this gathering gives you the opportunity to connect with new people and new ideas. This summer we have been considering the vital role of complex narratives in our work through projects like CPDP, Beneath the Surface, our podcasts You Didn't See Nothin and Somebody, as well as other investigations. We are eager to continue this conversation with you. 

The picnic is BYOG (bring your own grill) and potluck. Please consider bringing a dish to share with others. We will provide tableware and drinks. Children, pets, and dips in the lake are welcome.  While registration is not required, it will help us with expected attendance. 

Join us virtually on June 5th at 5:30pm for a screening of a new short documentary on Beneath the Surface.

Last year, filmmaker cai thomas followed our director of data Trina Reynolds-Tyler as she led more than 400 volunteers in analyzing police complaint narratives for our Beneath the Surface project and attended the annual We Walk for Her March for Missing and Murdered Black Women in Bronzeville.

This short film was recently released as part of PBS Independent Lens’ Bridge Builders series.

In the lead up to this year's annual March in Bronzeville, join us to watch the short documentary and discuss Trina’s & co-reporter Sarah Conway's (City Bureau) emerging investigation into police response to patterns of missing Black women. We’ll be screening this Beneath the Surface documentary on zoom. We invite you to join us. Please register in advance.

About Bridge Builders: Across the United States, community leaders of different ages, backgrounds, and geographies are fighting for criminal justice reform. Their work has tangible impacts on the lives of those around them and together they look to a future where no one is left behind. Independent Lens Bridge Builders is a series of short documentaries highlighting these changemakers and their communities, collectively crafting a picture of the reform landscape nationwide.

About cai thomas: cai is a documentary filmmaker and dp telling vérité stories at the intersection of location, self-determination, and identity about Black youth and elders. She grew up in Miami’s Liberty City neighborhood and is deeply interested in stories rooted in place. Her recent films include, Change The Name and Queenie. cai is a proud NeXt Doc alumn and was an inaugural Mellon Arts Practitioner Fellow at Stanford’s Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity in 2021. She is currently developing a film about Black Lesbian family planning.

About Beneath the Surface: Beneath the Surface is an investigation into gender-based violence at the hands of police. This project uses machine learning and narrative justice to better understand how marginalized communities experience police violence. Beneath the Surface is committed to building the bridge between data science and narrative justice, while centering survivors' experiences. We use principled data processing, a data pipeline coined by Patrick Ball of Human Rights Data Analysis Group (HRDAG), for processing data and machine learning. Every week a team of Black programmers meets with our partners at HRDAG to share code and improve their technical skills, working towards a data practice that is replicable, auditable, scalable, and transparent. Our aim is to better equip members to use data science to address human rights violations in their communities moving forward. Trina Reynolds-Tyler leads this project as our Director of Data.

Interested in knowing more about podcasting? Join the Invisible Institute podcast team—creators of the Pulitzer-Prize finalist Somebody—as they discuss how they made their hit new podcast You Didn’t See Nothin. 

Host Yohance Lacour—writer, entrepreneur, and Hyde-Parker—went from not knowing what a podcast was in 2020, to creating what one critic called “one of the best podcasts I ever heard.” 

Join Yohance and the other producers as they play clips from the podcast, share how it was made, and answer your questions about You Didn’t See Nothin and podcasting in general. 

You’ll get a lot more out of the session if you listen to at least the first episode beforehand. Listen to You Didn’t See Nothin wherever you get your podcasts. 

This event is sponsored by the Digital Storytelling Initiative at the Logan Center for the Arts.