Our Pulitzer Prize-winning investigation, “Missing in Chicago,” gets its day at City Hall

by India Daniels

Screen capture of City Bureau Senior Reporter Sarah Conway and Invisible Institute Data Director Trina Reynolds-Tyler testifying before the Chicago City Council Committee on Public Safety on October 23, 2024.

Teresa Smith and her family never got justice after her mother disappeared six years ago.

Smith was one of several speakers at a City Council hearing last week on the crisis of missing Black women and girls, and how the Chicago Police Department is doing little to solve the issue. The hearing, proposed by Ald. Stephanie Coleman (16th Ward) earlier this year, was in large part spurred by a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigation published by City Bureau and Invisible Institute, “Missing In Chicago.”

Smith spoke for 10 minutes about her mother Daisy Hayes, 65, who went missing in 2018. When she turned to the police for help, she was met with dismissive questions and bureaucratic inaction, Smith said.

Her mother’s boyfriend was charged with murder but acquitted in a 2022 trial. Hayes’ body was never recovered.

“Everybody failed my mother,” Smith told City Council members. “Every last one of y’all. I’m so serious. Everybody failed my mother. She got nothing.” 

Over four hours, alders heard from grieving family members, community organizers and journalists. The energy in the room was solemn and sincere, with alders and speakers reiterating that the disproportionate rate at which Black women and girls go missing or are killed cannot continue.

Sarah Conway, senior reporter at City Bureau, and Trina Reynolds-Tyler, director of data at Invisible Institute, presented alders with learnings from two years of investigative reporting on the topic, weaving together individual women’s stories, CPD data and solutions from other communities that face a crisis of missing BIPOC women and girls. Since its publication in November 2023, “Missing in Chicago” has continued to reverberate across Chicago and the country, earning the 2024 Pulitzer Prize in local reporting. CBS 2 veteran Dorothy Tucker also shared insights from her investigation of crime against Black women.

All eyes then turned to Jarrod Smith, a commander representing CPD’s bureau of detectives, who shared some recent changes CPD has made:

Improving policies and best practices for missing persons investigations and data management

  • Instituting a mandatory digital screening to identify whether returned missing persons experienced harm or need additional support

  • Hiring an investigative data analyst, victim advocates, and a liaison at the Medical Examiner’s office

  • Creating resource guides for searching families and people who may be at risk of human trafficking

  •  Regular attendance at the Illinois task force on missing and murdered women

The biggest win, according to Conway, is digitizing the process for filing a missing persons report, which will reduce the time to assign a detective to the case.

Smith was unprepared, however, to answer Ald. Jeanette Taylor (20th Ward) when she asked how many missing persons cases were currently unsolved. Reynolds-Tyler, who had the data at her fingertips, chimed in that from 2020 to August 2024, a total of 40,000 missing person reports were filed; 558 cases remain open.

Earlier this year, Mayor Brandon Johnson committed to forming a task force on the issue of missing Black women and girls, mirroring the statewide task force that is due to submit a report to the Illinois General Assembly by the end of the year. Ald. Maria Hadden (49th Ward) reminded the committee that last year’s budget cut funding for the city’s gender-based violence efforts; Ald. Byron Sigcho-Lopez (25th Ward) said it would be “unconscionable” to increase the police budget “when those resources are poorly deployed.”

Much work remains, but the crisis of missing Black women and girls will be fresh on alders’ minds as they enter budget season. “The system is used to doing nothing,” Taylor said, “but we gotta hold [CPD’s] feet to the fire.”

For more coverage of this hearing, check out live tweets from Morley Musick for Chicago Documenters and reporting from Invisible Institute’s Sam Stecklow.

A version of this story was first published in the October 30 2024 issue of the Newswire, an email newsletter that is your weekly guide to Chicago government, civic action and what we can do to make our city great. You can sign up for the weekly newsletter here.

Have thoughts on what you'd like to see in this feature? Email Editorial Director Ariel Cheung at ariel@citybureau.org.