Left in the Dark: The Failed Promise of Chicago Police Body Cameras
2/3/2022
I analyzed internal records to show that Chicago Police officers failed to use body cameras tens of thousands of times — especially in Black and Latino neighborhoods.
I FOIA-ed the Chicago Police Department (CPD) for every investigatory-stop report filed after body cams went city-wide and received 340,000 records covering January 2018 – June 2020. Each report states whether the stop was recorded, so I filtered to officers who are supposed to wear cameras, flagged non-recorded encounters, and calculated compliance rates city-wide and by neighborhood, uncovering roughly 34,000 potential policy violations and lower recording rates on the South and West Sides.
To learn what supervisors were (or weren’t) doing about it, we spent six months prying loose the Body Camera Committee’s internal audits — twice denied, then released only after I appealed to the Illinois attorney general — and mined the reports for patterns in random video reviews and missed discipline.
I also FOIA-ed the city's police accountability agency for specific body-cam and dash-cam footage, plus sought discipline logs, then cross-checked lawsuits and COPA summaries from the Invisible Institute to document at least ten other examples of unrecorded incidents. Those videos and lawsuit files grounded the data in real cases where missing footage undermined accountability.