James Ewan Kalven (born 1948) is an American journalist, author, human rights activist, and community organizer based in Chicago, Illinois. He is the founder of the Invisible Institute, a non-profit journalism organization based in Chicago's South Side. His work in the city has included reporting on police misconduct and poor conditions of public housing. Kalven has been referred to as a "guerrilla journalist" by Chicago journalist Studs Terkel.[1]
He is the son of Harry Kalven, a law professor who left behind an unfinished manuscript on freedom of speech upon his death in 1974. Jamie finished the manuscript over the following 14 years. Following a sexual assault on his wife, Patricia Evans, Kalven wrote a memoir as a resource to support victims of rape. He also reported on living conditions at the Stateway Gardens housing development in the Bronzeville neighborhood of Chicago. Along with Evans and an associate, Kalven founded the Invisible Institute as an informal journalism and community organizing team at Stateway. His reporting on abuse by Chicago police at Stateway eventually led to litigation seeking the release of police misconduct records, which Kalven won in 2014. The case – Kalven v. City of Chicago – resulted in a landmark decision, holding that police misconduct records are public information under the Illinois Freedom of Information Act.
Having obtained the police records, the Invisible Institute incorporated as a nonprofit organization soon thereafter. The Institute created the Citizens Police Data Project and became a hub for information related to police misconduct, wrongful convictions, and reports from police whistleblowers. Kalven reported on the murder of Laquan McDonald by a police officer in 2014. He obtained a copy of an autopsy report showing that McDonald had been shot 16 times execution-style, contradicting official reports of a single gunshot wound. Kalven won the Ridenhour Courage Prize for this reporting. He later co-produced 16 Shots, a documentary about McDonald's murder. The Institute won the Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting in 2021, and Kalven stepped down as director in the same year.
His father, Harry, died in 1974 at the age of 60, leaving behind an unfinished manuscript on legal theories underlying freedom of speech.[13] At the time, Jamie was living in San Francisco with his future wife, photographer Patricia Evans, whom he married in 1977.[2][5][12] Upon his father's death, Kalven paused his freelance writing career and spent the following 14 years working on the manuscript, which was eventually completed and published by Harper & Row in 1988 as A Worthy Tradition: Freedom of Speech in America.[5][12] He had reviewed annotations on the drafts and consulted notes from Harry's former students. The young journalist also occasionally traveled to New Haven, Connecticut, to discuss the book with Owen M. Fiss, a professor at Yale Law School and Harry's former colleague at the University of Chicago. During this project, Kalven supported his family – Evans and their two children – through freelance writing and work as a handyman and house painter.[9] The book was also supported by foundation grants, the first coming from the Playboy Foundation.[12]Benno C. Schmidt Jr., president of Yale University, described the younger Kalven's work as "an extraordinary act of intellectual and filial devotion".[5]
After finishing his father's book, Kalven became drawn to stories and communities in Chicago.[1] On September 21, 1988, his wife, Patricia Evans, was beaten and sexually assaulted while jogging during the daytime along the lakefront by their home in Hyde Park.[5] Evans, aged 45 at the time, was traumatized for at least 10 years. As a professional photographer, she took photos of rape victims and helped tell their stories for the "Voices and Faces" project.[14] The attack prompted Kalven to investigate the drivers of violence, poverty, and racial divisions in America; Evans is white, and her assailant was black. Kalven thus wrote a memoir, Working with Available Light: A Family's World After Violence.[5] Published in 1999, the book has been a resource for rape counselors, victims, and their families seeking to understand the emotional aftermath of sexual assaults. Kalven faced criticism for sharing intimate details of his and Evans's lives, especially writing as a man in a field that mainly affects women.[14] The book also prompted debate over the role, if any, men should play.[15] Nonetheless, Rape Victim Advocates (RVA), a Chicago-based advocacy and counseling organization, praised Kalven for sharing the perspective of a partner of a victim, uncommon in works about sexual violence. In 2005, he was honored by RVA for his work supporting sexual assault survivors and violence prevention. Chicago journalist Studs Terkel, a friend of Kalven and his late father Harry, presented the award.[14]
Starting in 1993, Kalven and other community organizers held monthly gatherings, called "Vigil Against Violence", in which attendees would mourn victims of urban violence by reading the names of those killed in the South Side. The gatherings took place at the Stateway Gardens housing development in Bronzeville.[16] At the time, Stateway was one of the city's most violent and poorest areas.[5] The vigil gathered for around five years, after which Kalven continued his involvement at Stateway. He helped rehabilitate vacant lots into gardens and parks, and in 1997 he founded the Neighborhood Conservation Corps, which offered job training and social services.[17][16]
Terkel once referred to Kalven as a "guerrilla journalist"; Kalven concurs with the use of that term.[1] However, he has been criticized for holding dual roles as an activist and a journalist.[5] His work has included reporting on police misconduct and poor conditions of public housing. In the mid-1990s, after years of reporting on Stateway, he became a formal advisor to the housing project's resident council, supporting negotiations with government agencies and private developers.[4] Around 2000–2001, Kalven, his wife Evans, and computer developer David Eads started the Invisible Institute as an informal team focused on journalism and community organizing. Eads developed the website that published Kalven's reporting and Evans's photographic documentation. They occupied an empty apartment in Stateway, reporting on abusive policing at the housing project through their photojournalism blog and webzine, The View from the Ground. The "Invisible Institute" was a fictitious name for the blog's publisher. The team funded itself through a separate handyman business that also employed Stateway residents.[18][19] A loose association of collaborators working on race and poverty issues in Chicago would eventually help expand the team even further. This included civil rights attorneys and law students at the Mandel Legal Aid Clinic, a legal clinic at the University of Chicago Law School.[1]
In April 2003, a black Stateway resident, Diane Bond, was allegedly attacked and harassed by a group of white Chicago police officers called the "Skullcap Crew". According to Bond, the officers forcibly entered her apartment, beat her, and terrorized her, her son, and others. They threatened to plant drugs on her and forced her to display her genitals, purportedly in search of drugs.[20] The officers also forced Bond's son to attack another man in the building.[21] Kalven had been investigating stories of other alleged abuses by the Skullcap Crew over several years, and he was dissatisfied with how the police department handled his complaints. He persuaded Craig Futterman, an attorney at the Mandel Clinic, to represent Bond. The clinic filed a federal civil rights suit – titled Bond v. Utreras – in April 2004, but the incident went unreported in the mainstream media. Only Kalven reported on the story, writing a series called "Kicking the Pigeon" starting in July 2005. The series comprised 17 articles covering police misconduct allegations in public housing, published on his webzine The View from the Ground,[5] and was completed by 2006.[22] In June 2005, an attorney for the city issued a subpoena for Kalven's records from his reporting at Stateway, but he resisted the subpoena, citing the reporter's privilege. Kalven was represented by Thomas P. Sullivan, a former U.S. Attorney and partner at Jenner & Block. A magistrate judge rejected the subpoena as overly broad and placing an undue burden upon Kalven.[5]
Obtaining police misconduct records
Kalven v. City of Chicago
Bilandic Building, home of the First District Appellate Court, in Chicago
Records of completed investigations into alleged police misconduct, and lists of police officers with the most misconduct complaints, are subject to disclosure under the Illinois Freedom of Information Act.
Decision by
Connors, joined by Cunningham
Concurrence
Delort
Bond's attorney, Craig Futterman, asked the police department to hand over misconduct complaints and disciplinary records, as part of discovery to establish a pattern of abuse. The city produced a list of 662 officers who had received 10 or more complaints from 2001 through 2006. However, a protective order prevented Futterman from sharing those records with the public, including Kalven. In 2007, Bond's lawsuit was settled out of court for $150,000.[16][21] Before the settlement was finalized, Kalven intervened in the case as a journalist, saying the documents should be made public.[22]
U.S. District Judge Joan Lefkow agreed to lift the protective order, finding that the information had "a distinct public character", relating to the official duties of the police officers. The city appealed Lefkow's ruling to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit. At the appellate stage, Kalven was joined by 28 Chicago aldermen – a majority of the city council – who had been denied access to the same information by the city's law department under Mayor Richard M. Daley. A collective amicus curiae brief was filed by several news organizations – including the Associated Press, Chicago Tribune, Chicago Sun-Times, Chicago Reader, The New York Times, Copley Press, Gannett, Lee Enterprises, and the Illinois Press Association. The appeals court overturned Lefkow's ruling on procedural grounds, finding that Kalven lacked standing to intervene because the case had already been settled. However, the appeals court also stated in a footnote that Kalven was not prevented from seeking the records from the city directly through the Illinois Freedom of Information Act (FOIA).[16][23]
Following the footnote in the Bond opinion, Kalven and Futterman initiated the FOIA process with the city.[16] Kalven filed two requests. One asked for lists of officers with the most misconduct complaints (known as "repeater lists"), while the second asked for records of investigations into misconduct complaints (known as "complaint register files"). The city denied the requests, arguing that the complaint register files were exempt from disclosure under FOIA because they related to the police department's adjudication proceedings, and also because they contained preliminary recommendations on potential disciplinary actions.[24]
The Illinois Appellate Court rejected the city's arguments in March 2014, in the case Kalven v. City of Chicago.[25] The court held that the complaint register files were not "related to" adjudication proceedings, even though such complaints may eventually lead to disciplinary action. Any preliminary recommendations could be redacted, but the files could not be withheld in their entirety. As for the repeater lists, the court acknowledged the city's contentions that the police department did not ordinarily create such lists during the course of its business, but rather prepared them solely for discovery purposes in the Bond case. However, the repeater lists are still considered to be public records under FOIA, and they merely summarized the complaint register files, so the lists are subject to disclosure for the same reasons.[24]
The city threatened to appeal to the Supreme Court of Illinois, but ultimately agreed to release the complaint records to the public.[16] The case became a landmark decision, holding that police misconduct records are public information.[18] Kalven's FOIA litigation, which Futterman and others worked on pro bono, accrued nearly $500,000 in attorney's fees. Of that amount, Kalven agreed to settle for a recovery of $200,000.[16]
Formalizing the Invisible Institute
Invisible Institute office in 2022
After the 2014 court decision, the Invisible Institute incorporated as a nonprofit organization and recruited staff members to work on the release of the police information.[22] By 2017, the Institute was based in Woodlawn.[18] The court decision led to the creation in November 2015 of the Citizens Police Data Project and the Chicago Police Database, a public database of over 54,000 misconduct complaints against more than 8,000 officers from March 2011 through March 2015. The Institute and several other media outlets filed new FOIA requests for all misconduct records going back to 1967. Before the city could comply, the Fraternal Order of Police sued to block the release of those records, arguing that the union's collective bargaining agreement required misconduct records older than 5 years to be destroyed.[6][26] The Appellate Court later ruled that the agreement's requirement to destroy records was unenforceable, as it would cause the city to violate FOIA.[27]
Eventually, the Institute became a hub for Chicago police misconduct data, and by 2022 the data project included 247,161 allegations. The data project, ranging from 1988 to 2018, houses complaints and allegations made against officers, the number of sustained complaints, and individual officer profiles that list officer salaries and discipline they received for use-of-force incidents.[22] In January 2016, the data project received $400,000 in grant funding from the Knight Foundation.[21] In the fall of that year, Kalven published an exposé on the Watts crew, a group of police officers who allegedly harassed public housing residents in the South Side. The work was published on The Intercept, and the Institute petitioned the Circuit Court of Cook County to review possible wrongful convictions associated with those officers. The Institute also created a bureau focused on wrongful convictions and sharing accounts of police whistleblowers.[18]
Starting in the early 2010s, the Institute worked on an initiative, called the "Youth/Police Project", to educate black teenagers on their constitutional rights, and to document their frequent experiences with police. Videos from the project have been used to show to policymakers and to train police officers.[21]
Kalven reported on the murder of Laquan McDonald, a black teenager, by white Chicago police officer Jason Van Dyke in October 2014.[28] The official story from the police department initially suggested that McDonald had rushed at officers with a knife, and died from a single gunshot by Van Dyke. However, in early November, a confidential whistleblower from the police department informed Kalven and Futterman of the existence of a dashcam video that contradicted the official account. The source also revealed that McDonald had not rushed at the officers but rather was moving away from them, and Van Dyke had shot McDonald 16 times, execution-style[discuss]. In December, they publicly called for the dashcam video's release. After the city refused multiple times, Futterman sued for the video's release.[6][28]
In February 2015, Kalven obtained a copy of McDonald's autopsy report, which contradicted the official account of a single gunshot and instead confirmed that Van Dyke had shot McDonald 16 times, execution-style.[28] In the same month, attorneys for McDonald's family had received a copy of the video by filing a subpoena, and demanded $16 million in compensation from the city. By March, McDonald's family and the city approved a $5 million settlement agreement, which also required that the video be kept confidential until the investigation was completed. The video was not released to the public until November 26, 2015, thirteen months after McDonald's murder.[6]
Kalven's and Futterman's work led to political fallout, including protests and demands for the resignation or recall of Mayor Rahm Emanuel and other officials. Emanuel fired Chicago Police Superintendent Garry McCarthy along with the head of the department's oversight agency, and the U.S. Department of Justice opened investigations into the police department.[6][19] Kalven's reporting on the autopsy report also won him the George Polk Award for Local Reporting in 2015[29] and the Ridenhour Courage Prize in March 2016.[21]
In 2017, Kalven was subpoenaed to testify about his sources at a hearing for the murder case against Van Dyke. Cook County Judge Vincent Gaughan quashed the subpoena, finding that Van Dyke's attorneys were engaged in a "fishing expedition" and did not demonstrate that Kalven's testimony would be relevant to their case. Gaughan's decision relied less on the reporter's privilege, but recognized that journalists could not be forced to reveal their sources absent "extraordinary circumstances".[30] In 2018, Kalven was again subpoenaed to testify at a trial of three other police officers involved in the incident, but that subpoena was withdrawn.[31]
Kalven stepped down as director of the Institute in 2021. In April 2022, Kalven was recognized for his human rights reporting when he was awarded the I. F. Stone Medal for Journalistic Independence.[1]
Kalven, Jamie (1998). "'Do You Know Where You Are?': A Memoir of Becoming a South Sider". In Ayers, William; Hunt, Jean Ann; Quinn, Therese (eds.). Teaching for Social Justice: A Democracy and Education Reader. New York: New Press, Teachers College Press. ISBN9781565844209.
—— (1999). Working with Available Light: A Family's World After Violence. New York: W. W. Norton. ISBN9780393046908.
——; Evans, Patricia; Eads, David (2001–2007). The View from the Ground. Stateway Gardens, Chicago: Invisible Institute (fictitious publisher).
—— (July 6, 2005 – February 16, 2006). "Kicking the Pigeon". The View from the Ground – Reporting on the incidents that led to the Bond v. Utreras litigation.
Futterman, Craig B.; Hunt, Chaclyn; —— (2016). "They Have All the Power": Youth/Police Encounters on Chicago's South Side. Chicago: University of Chicago Law School. OCLC947589612.
The New York City Police Department (NYPD), officially the City of New York Police Department, is the primary law enforcement agency within New York City. Established on May 23, 1845, the NYPD is the largest, and one of the oldest, municipal police departments in the United States.
The Chicago Police Department (CPD) is the primary law enforcement agency of the city of Chicago, Illinois, United States, under the jurisdiction of the Chicago City Council. It is the second-largest municipal police department in the United States, behind the New York City Police Department. As of 2022 CPD had 11,710 sworn officers on duty, and in 2020 had over 948 other employees. Tracing its roots to 1835, the Chicago Police Department is one of the oldest modern police departments in the world.
Police misconduct is inappropriate conduct and illegal actions taken by police officers in connection with their official duties. Types of misconduct include among others: sexual offences, coerced false confession, intimidation, false arrest, false imprisonment, falsification of evidence, spoliation of evidence, police perjury, witness tampering, police brutality, police corruption, racial profiling, unwarranted surveillance, unwarranted searches, and unwarranted seizure of property.
The NYC Civilian Complaint Review Board (CCRB) is a civilian oversight agency with jurisdiction over the New York City Police Department (NYPD), the largest police force in the United States. A board of the Government of New York City, the CCRB is tasked with investigating, mediating and prosecuting complaints of misconduct on the part of the NYPD. Its regulations are compiled in Title 38-A of the New York City Rules.
Jamie Graham, O.O.M. is a former chief for the Victoria Police Department. He previously served as the chief constable of Vancouver, British Columbia from August 22, 2002 to August 13, 2007. A former Royal Canadian Mounted Police officer, Graham's five-year contract with the Vancouver Police Department was not renewed. His time as chief there ended on August 22, 2007.
A Pitchess motion is a request made by the defense in a California criminal case, such as a DUI case or a resisting arrest case, to access a law enforcement officer's personnel information when the defendant alleges in an affidavit that the officer used excessive force or lied about the events surrounding the defendant's arrest. The information provided will include prior incidents of use of force, allegations of excessive force, citizen complaints, and information gathered during the officer's pre-employment background investigation. The motion's name comes from the case Pitchess v. Superior Court.
Anita M. Alvarez is the former State's Attorney for Cook County, Illinois, United States. Alvarez was the first Hispanic woman elected to this position, after being the first Latina to win the Democratic nomination for state's attorney of Cook County.
Harry Kalven Jr. was an American legal scholar known for his scholarship on tort law and United States constitutional law. He was the Harry A. Bigelow Professor of Law at the University of Chicago Law School, having graduated from the College and the Law School. Kalven coauthored, with Charles O. Gregory, a widely used textbook in the field of torts, Cases and Materials on Torts. Kalven was also a scholar in the field of constitutional law, particularly in the area of the First Amendment. Kalven is the coauthor of "The Contemporary Function of the Class Suit," one of the most heavily cited articles in the history of American law, and widely considered to be the foundation of the modern class action lawsuit. He also co-authored a pioneering empirical study of The American Jury with his Chicago colleague Hans Zeisel.
Police brutality is the use of excessive or unwarranted force by law enforcement against civilians. Police brutality involves physical or psychological harm to a person and can involve beatings, killing, intimidation tactics, racist abuse, and torture.
Operation Elveden was a British police investigation into allegations of inappropriate payments to police officers and other public officials. It was opened as a result of documents provided by News International to the Operation Weeting investigation.
The Windsor Police Service is the municipal law enforcement agency in Windsor, Ontario, Canada. It succeeded the Royal Canadian Rifle Regiment.
The murder of Laquan McDonald took place on October 20, 2014, in Chicago, Illinois. McDonald was a 17-year-old who was fatally shot by a Chicago Police Officer, Jason Van Dyke. Police had initially reported that McDonald was behaving erratically while walking down the street, refusing to put down a knife, and that he had lunged at officers. Preliminary internal police reports described the incident similarly, leading to the shooting being judged as justifiable, and Van Dyke not being charged at the time. This was later disproved after a video of the encounter was released, showing that McDonald was walking away.
The following is a list of notable lawsuits involving former United States president Donald Trump. The list excludes cases that only name Trump as a legal formality in his capacity as president, such as habeas corpus requests.
Vincent Michael Gaughan is a Cook County Circuit Court Judge in Cook County, Illinois who presided in the historic trial of Jason Van Dyke, the Chicago Police officer who murdered Laquan McDonald.
Somebody is an American true crime podcast, hosted by Shapearl Wells, that investigates the shooting and death of her son, Courtney Copeland. The series premiered on March 31, 2020 and is hosted by Copeland's mother Shapearl Wells, Alison Flowers, and Bill Healy. The podcast was a Pulitzer Prize finalist in 2021.
Illinois Public Access Opinion 16‑006 is a binding opinion of the Illinois Attorney General pursuant to the state's Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). Issued in 2016 in the aftermath of the police murder of Laquan McDonald, the opinion addressed a public records request from Cable News Network (CNN) for private emails by officers of the Chicago Police Department (CPD) related to the incident. After the CPD denied CNN's request, the Attorney General's office, led by Lisa Madigan, ruled that the police officers' private emails about McDonald's murder were subject to public disclosure, even though those emails were communicated on accounts outside of the police department's email servers.
16 Shots is a documentary film about the murder of Laquan McDonald. Written and directed by Richard Rowley, it is an updated and expanded version of the 2018 movie The Blue Wall. It had a limited theatrical release on June 7, 2019, and started streaming on Showtime on June 14, 2019. It was released on DVD on August 4, 2020.
The Illinois Freedom of Information Act, 5 ILCS 140/1 et seq., is an Illinois statute that grants to all persons the right to copy and inspect public records in the state. The law applies to executive and legislative bodies of state government, units of local government, and other entities defined as "public bodies". All records related to governmental business are presumed to be open for inspection by the public, except for information specifically exempted from disclosure by law. The statute is modeled after the federal Freedom of Information Act and serves a similar purpose as freedom of information legislation in the other U.S. states.
The Illinois Public Access Counselor (PAC) is an attorney in the office of the Illinois Attorney General who is responsible for enforcing the state's Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) and Open Meetings Act (OMA). The PAC is the head of the Public Access Bureau, a group of more than one dozen attorneys who process complaints against public bodies and provide education to the public on Illinois' transparency laws.
John Catanzara is an American police union leader, and former member of the Chicago Police Department. Since May 2020, Catanzara has been president of Lodge 7 of the Fraternal Order of Police. He joined the Chicago Police Department in 1995 and was placed on administrative leave after filing a report against former Police Superintendent Eddie T. Johnson. Catanzara resigned from the CPD in November 2021, as his firing from the CPD appeared imminent, and announced his intention to run for mayor of Chicago.
1 2 Vermont Department of Health (1977). "Jamie Ewan Kalven". Vermont, U.S., Marriage Records, 1909–2008. Chittenden 1977. Montpelier: Vermont State Archives and Records Administration. p.251. Archived from the original on March 17, 2024. Retrieved March 16, 2024.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply. Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.
