Jamie Kalven

Kalven's yearbook photo at the University of Chicago Laboratory Schools in 1965

Kalven grew up in the Kenwood neighborhood of Chicago, and he is a lifelong resident of the city's South Side.[6] He was the oldest of four children,[2] and grew up in a secular Jewish family.[3] His father was Harry Kalven Jr., an alumnus of and law professor at the University of Chicago Law School.[6] Jamie attended high school at the University of Chicago Laboratory Schools, graduating in 1965.[7] Afterwards, he graduated from Wesleyan University.[5] Jamie was an avid mountaineer, having climbed mountains in the Western U.S., Yukon, Europe, and the Himalayas.[7] He interrupted his trip to the Himalayas to visit Bangladesh during the Indo-Pakistani War of 1971, which led him to give up serious mountaineering to become a journalist. By his mid-20s, Jamie had become a well-published journalist and intended to pursue a career as a foreign correspondent focused on Asia.[1][4]

His father, Harry, died in 1974 at the age of 60, leaving behind an unfinished manuscript on legal theories underlying freedom of speech.[8] At the time, Jamie was living in San Francisco with his wife, photographer Patricia Evans. He paused his freelance writing career and spent the following 14 years working on his father's manuscript, which was eventually completed and published in 1988 as A Worthy Tradition: Freedom of Speech in America.[2][4] He had reviewed annotations on the drafts and consulted notes from Harry's former students. He 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, Jamie supported his family – his wife and two children – through freelance writing and work as a handyman and house painter.[5] He also received foundation grants, the first coming from the Playboy Foundation.[4] Benno C. Schmidt Jr., president of Yale University, described Jamie's work as "an extraordinary act of intellectual and filial devotion."[2]

In 1988, he was teaching creative writing at Northwestern University, and planned to write a book about civil liberties.[4] He also intended to resume freelance writing.[5]

Youth at the Stateway Gardens housing project in 1973

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. The attack prompted Kalven to understand 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.[2] Starting in 1993, he and other community organizers gathered at the Stateway Gardens housing development in Bronzeville to mourn victims of urban violence. During the monthly gathering, called "Vigil Against Violence", attendees would read the names of those killed in the South Side.[9] At the time, Stateway was one of the city's most violent and poorest areas.[2] The vigil gathered for around five years, after which Kalven continued his involvement at Stateway. He worked on a project to turn vacant lots into gardens and parks, and he founded the Neighborhood Conservation Corps, which offered job training and social services.[9]

Journalist Studs Terkel once referred to Kalven as a "guerrilla journalist", a label that Kalven likes.[1] However, he has been criticized for holding dual roles as an activist and a journalist.[2] 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.[6] 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' 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.[10][11] Over time, the team grew into an association of collaborators working on race and poverty issues in Chicago, including 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.[12] The officers also forced Bond's son to attack another man in the building.[13] 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,[2] and was completed by 2006.[14] 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.[2]

Kalven v. City of Chicago
Bilandic Building, home of the First District Appellate Court, in Chicago
Court	Illinois Appellate Court, First District
Full case name	Jamie Kalven v. The City of Chicago and the Chicago Police Department
Decided	March 10, 2014 (2014-03-10)
Citation(s)	2014 IL App (1st) 121846 7 N.E.3d 741 (2014)
Case history
Appealed from	Circuit Court of Cook County, No. 09-CH-51396 Neil H. Cohen, Judge, presiding
Court membership
Judges sitting	Maureen Connors, Joy Cunningham, Mathias W. Delort
Case opinions
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

As part of discovery in Bond's case, Futterman requested misconduct complaints and disciplinary records from the police department, 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 settled out of court for $150,000.[9][13] Before the settlement was finalized, Kalven intervened in the case as a journalist, saying the documents should be made public.[14]

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. At the appellate stage, Kalven was joined by 28 Chicago aldermen – more than half 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 media outlets – 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).[9][15]

Following the footnote in the Bond opinion, Kalven and Futterman initiated the FOIA process with the city.[9] 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.[16]

The Illinois Appellate Court rejected the city's arguments in March 2014, in the case Kalven v. City of Chicago.[17] 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.[16]

The city threatened to appeal to the Supreme Court of Illinois, but ultimately agreed to release the complaint records to the public.[9] The case became a "landmark decision", holding that police misconduct records are public information.[10] Kalven's FOIA litigation, which Futterman and others worked on pro bono, accrued roughly $500,000 in attorney's fees. Of that amount, Kalven agreed to settle for a recovery of $200,000.[9]

Invisible Institute office in 2022

After the court decision, Invisible Institute formally incorporated as a nonprofit and recruited staff members to work on the release of the police information,[14] and by 2017, the Institute was based in Woodlawn.[10] 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.[3][18] The Appellate Court later ruled that the agreement's requirement to destroy records was unenforceable, as it would cause the city to violate FOIA.[19]

Eventually, the Institute became a hub for Chicago police misconduct data, and by 2022 the data project included 247,161 allegations. The data project 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. The data is from 1988 to 2018.[14] In January 2016, the data project received $400,000 in grant funding from the Knight Foundation.[13] 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.[10]

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.[13]

Autopsy diagram from the murder of Laquan McDonald

Kalven reported on the murder of Laquan McDonald, a black teenager, by white Chicago police officer Jason Van Dyke in October 2014.[20] The official story 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. In December, they publicly called for the dashcam video's release. After the city refused multiple times, Futterman sued for the video's release.[3][20]

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.[20] 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 is completed. The video was not released to the public until November 26, 2015, thirteen months after McDonald's murder.[3]

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.[3][11] Kalven's reporting on the autopsy report also won him the George Polk Award for Local Reporting in 2015[21] and the Ridenhour Courage Prize in March 2016.[13]

In 2017, Kalven was subpoenaed to testify about his sources at a pre-trial hearing for the murder case against Van Dyke, but the subpoena was quashed under the reporter's privilege. In 2018, he was subpoenaed to testify at a trial of three other police officers involved in the incident, but that subpoena was withdrawn.[22]

Kalven in 2022

Kalven was a visiting Practitioner-in-Residence at the Kenan Institute for Ethics at Duke University in 2017.[23][24] He co-produced 16 Shots, an Emmy-winning documentary on the McDonald case. He also worked as a consultant on the TV series 61st Street. In 2021, the Institute won a Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting for its investigation into abusive biting by police dogs, and its podcast Somebody was also a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Audio Reporting.[7]

Kalven stepped down as director of the Institute in 2021. In April 2022, Kalven was awarded the I. F. Stone Medal for Journalistic Independence, in recognition of his human rights reporting.[1]

• Invisible Institute
  • Citizen Police Data Project