![]() ![]() “What’s really important about the CPDP is that you get an opportunity to not only understand big top-level databases, but you also get access to the narratives of so many people who have reported their negative interactions with police officers,” Reynolds-Tyler says. Chicago’s police records were made available to the public due to a lawsuit filed by Jamie Kalven, the executive director of the Invisible Institute. The CPDP is unusual, in that it makes data accessible in a way that many other cities’ data is not. “As time goes on, we are learning how much information we don’t have access to and how much information gets lost in the game of telephone when they are passing along complaints,” Reynolds-Tyler says. By implementing everyday language, the CPDP goes beyond the complaint summaries from official reports and filters them in a more comprehensive way on its database. Rajiv Sinclair, director of the CPDP, says the group relies on its own categorization of repeat offenders and complaint summaries, as opposed to the bureaucratic jargon and classification used in police reports. Using the archives, viewers can see the faces of Black men who were tortured by former police Commander Jon Burge in the 1970s and 1990s, and hear them recount their stories in haunting detail through audiotapes and candid pictures of the survivors. One way the Invisible Institute has made sure police complaint stories are more complete, rather than just taken from the police department’s documents, is through the creation of the Chicago Police Torture Archives. Since its launch in 2015, the CPDP has been used more than 1.2 million times by users who have used it to download 88,000 case documents. The CPDP transfers misconduct data directly from the city and creates profiles of active and former police officers in Chicago. Through her work with Black Youth Project 100, a Black activist group focusing on Black, feminist and LGTBQ+ issues, Reynolds-Tyler believes in building a world where all people have the same resources and opportunities in accessing police data records, while also being able to live free of being accosted by police officers. When former Chicago police Officer Jason Van Dyke murdered Laquan McDonald in 2014, Reynolds-Tyler says besides wanting him in prison, people also wanted to make sure they never again saw the conditions that led to Black people like McDonald being murdered at the hands of police officers. “A system that is currently built around police is not built for accountability,” Reynolds-Tyler says. The word “abolitionist” enrages some, much like the phrase “defund the police,” because of its blunt phrasing and radical implications.Īs an abolitionist herself, Reynolds-Tyler says abolitionists seek out the root cause of violence, crime and conflict in communities, through communication with its citizens and as well as those who have the power to perpetrate violence with impunity. Reynolds-Tyler says she believes an abolitionist approach is necessary to solving the issue of police abusing their power, rather than solely having more Black cops. When Trina Reynolds-Tyler, the director of data at the Invisible Institute, started working there in 2006, the first thing she did was look up the Black police officer who had the most complaints on the database. The database she used was the Citizens Police Data Project created by the Invisible Institute, a nonprofit journalism production organization focused on holding police officers accountable to the public. A sea of boos erupted as those officers walked away from the police line blocking the protesters from the house. Through a megaphone, one protester standing in front of Lightfoot’s house rattled off the complaint history of two officers, using information from a public database on her phone. Outside the home of Mayor Lori Lightfoot one summer night, a single voice cut through the clamor of protesters wearing face masks and brandishing poster boards, demanding the Chicago Police Department be defunded and officers be removed from public schools. JCamilla Forte Editor’s note: This article is one in a series of stories from the Communication Department’s award-winning Echo magazine, featured this summer on the Chronicle site. ![]()
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