In the five years since the tragic death of George Floyd, Americans have wrestled with deep debates about criminal justice reform. A central part of that debate has been efforts by politicians, journalists, activists and researchers to shine a spotlight on police and prosecutors. I am one of those researchers, and I know how much resistance law enforcement officials often have to transparency into their workings.
For all of the critiques that are sometimes raised about law enforcement in Chicago, one of the things it has had to be proud of in recent years was its openness to the public. Unfortunately, since coming to office, State’s Attorney Eileen O’Neill Burke has taken a significant step backward.
Former State’s Attorney Kim Foxx became a leader nationally in transparency among prosecutors in collecting and publishing information about her office’s work. The Cook County state’s attorney’s office began publishing regularly detailed datasets about all of its felony cases on its website. The state’s attorney released detailed information about every felony arrest made and referred for prosecution. That information included not just when and where an arrest was made, but for what offense, exactly what charges were filed and demographic information about the defendant. They also included rich information about the outcomes of all of those charges — which charges were dropped, which ones ultimately led to convictions, the judges hearing the cases and what sentences were imposed.
Those datasets allowed the public, policymakers, activists and researchers to study, audit and understand the decisions the state’s attorney was making. The data allowed concerned citizens and others to know how prosecutorial power was being used and to conduct cutting-edge research about law enforcement.
Unfortunately, O’Neill Burke removed that data from the website without any explanation, virtually as soon as she came into office. The website that used to host the data and invite the public to contact the state’s attorney’s office for more information has for the last four months simply lead to an “access denied” website. We are now nearly six months into O’Neill Burke’s term, and the public records remain missing, with no explanation offered for why they have been removed or evidence that her office intends to continue updating those data or publishing new data. Emails I sent to the State’s Attorney’s office about the data never received a response. Additionally, several Freedom of Information Act requests for additional data, which had been previously released to others, were rejected.
Not only is the Cook County state’s attorney’s decision unfortunate because we now know less about how her office works, but it also reinforces a problematic reputation that law enforcement agencies, both locally and nationally, are working to overcome.
Here in Chicago, we have an excellent example of transparency in law enforcement. The Civilian Office of Police Accountability, for example, has the authority and responsibility to oversee and investigate police activity, including police shootings. Part of its mission involves transparency — giving the public access to information about how police officers use their power. At the same time, the Chicago Police Department has been subject to a consent decree since 2019. The consent decree has forced changes in how the Police Department operates and shares information with the public. Together, COPA and the consent decree have reinforced each other to open a window into policing in Chicago.
I know from my own research that they are working. In a book that will be published in the coming weeks, “Deadly Force: Police Shootings in Urban America,” I filed more than 300 FOIA requests at police departments around the country for records about every police shooting this century. We learned a lot about how law enforcement agencies resist transparency and how much work goes into finding out basic facts such as, “how many people do the police shoot?”
Some police departments are very transparent and happy to share their records, and some departments absolutely refuse. Even among those that are transparent, some have records that are very disorganized, whereas others have very organized and understandable records. CPD was among the most transparent departments in the country, sharing a lot of information with us, in a fast, clean and complete way. That may seem surprising, though it is very likely due to the consent decree. Indeed, CPD’s openness to researchers has enabled researchers to do powerful work that helps them understand important problems in law enforcement as well as evaluate programs and train leaders from police departments around the country.
Comparing Chicago with the Cook County state’s attorney is alarming. The records that Foxx shared were transparent, complete, coherent and accessible. By contrast, O’Neill Burke has taken the opposite approach. Whereas this time last year, anyone could know exactly how many felony charges of what kind were being filed, where, when, against whom, and what the outcomes were, and so forth, today none of that is public. As CPD has become more transparent and stayed that way, the Cook County state’s attorney is moving in the opposite direction, away from transparency.
These decisions — how a prosecutor uses the authority to file criminal charges — are among the most important and powerful that any government official has. Cook County stood out as a model for its transparency in allowing the public to see how that power was being used. We should demand an explanation for why that decision has been reversed and to know when the Cook County state’s attorney will allow the public to have access to its own records again.
Tom Clark is the David and Mary Winton Green professor of political science at the University of Chicago and co-author of the forthcoming book “Deadly Force: Police Shootings in Urban America.”
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