Over the last two years, reporters Sarah Conway (City Bureau) and Trina Reynolds-Tyler (Invisible Institute) investigated how the Chicago Police Department (CPD) handles missing person cases and found a pattern of neglect and discrepancies in the police response.
Black people make up about two-thirds of missing persons cases in Chicago, according to the last two decades of police data, and the vast majority of these cases are for Black children under the age of 21. In particular, Black girls and women between the ages of 10 and 20 make up nearly one-third of all Chicago missing persons cases despite comprising only two percent of the city population as of 2020.
From 2000 to 2021, Chicago Police categorized 99.8 percent of missing person cases as “not criminal in nature.” Our seven-part investigation calls this number into question. City Bureau and the Invisible Institute identified 11 cases that were miscategorized as “closed non-criminal” in the missing persons data despite being likely homicides — more than doubling the number of official homicides in missing persons police data. These 11 cases were part of a much larger pattern of neglect.
Read the full article in the Chicago Reader
Explore our full investigation at chicagomissingpersons.com