This framing of the case enabled Bond’s lawyers, in the course of civil discovery, to request documents that would shed light on the Chicago Police Department’s systems for monitoring, investigating, and disciplining officers. Futterman and his students brought a civil rights suit in which the city of Chicago and the police superintendent, as well as the individual officers who committed the abuses, were named as defendants on the grounds that the city had a de facto policy of “failing to properly supervise, monitor, discipline, counsel, and otherwise control its officers” and that top police officials were aware that “these practices would result in preventable police abuse.” In the case of Diane Bond, we pursued that question via litigation. Having experienced in the most direct and visceral way what impunity looks like on the ground, a question formed: What sorts of institutional conditions would have to exist for the patterns of abuse we had documented to be the case? Thus began the ascent of an analytic ladder - from human rights reporting on the abuses inflicted on particular victims by particular officers to the systems that enable and shield such abuse.
#Invisible institute series#
Over time, the Mandel Clinic brought six federal lawsuits on behalf of public housing residents abused by the police.Īmong the major stories we published on The View was a 17-part series titled “ Kicking the Pigeon” on the case of Diane Bond, a Stateway resident repeatedly assaulted - physically, sexually, emotionally - by a team of gang tactical officers known on the street as the “skullcap crew.”īy this point, we had been documenting individual instances of human rights abuse for several years. Mandel Legal Aid Clinic of the University of Chicago Law School. A prime example is our partnership over the last 18 years with civil rights attorney Craig Futterman and his students at the Edwin F. From the start, the Invisible Institute created capacity through collaboration. It came to refer not to a formal organization, but a loose network of collaborators and a certain style of inquiry, exploration, and relationship-building. Working out of a vacant, five-bedroom unit in a doomed public housing high-rise with an open-air drug market outside the door, we announced in the first issue of The View that it was published under the auspices of something called the Invisible Institute. The name “Invisible Institute” was first uttered in jest. And with two colleagues - David Eads and Patricia Evans - I published occasional human rights reports on conditions in public housing under the title “ The View From the Ground.” I served as an adviser to the resident council. I created a program of “grassroots public works” aimed at providing alternatives for ex-offenders and members of street gangs. It is also the story of how a style of on-the-ground reporting that Studs Terkel once characterized as “guerrilla journalism” matured into the Invisible Institute, a journalism production company based on the South Side of Chicago that has assumed the function of curating this category of public information on behalf of the public.ĭuring the final chapter of high-rise public housing in Chicago - from 1994 until the final demolition in 2007 - I was a daily presence at Stateway Gardens, a development centrally located in the massive concentration of public housing along a three-mile stretch of South State Street.
The decadelong effort to gain access to this information is an important thread in the history of the struggle for civil rights under law in Chicago. The scale of CPDP is without parallel: It includes more than 240,000 allegations of misconduct involving more than 22,000 Chicago police officers over a 50-year period. The data set is complete for the period 2000 to 2016 substantially complete back to 1988, and includes some data going back as far as the late 1960s.
Today the Invisible Institute, in collaboration with The Intercept, releases the Citizens Police Data Project 2.0, a public database containing the disciplinary histories of Chicago police officers.
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