The Invisible Institute produces independent journalism from the South Side of Chicago. The Invisible Institute is dedicated to enhancing the capacity of citizens to hold public institutions accountable and employs tactics including investigative reporting, multimedia storytelling and human rights documentation.
It all started with founder Jamie Kalven’s Sixteen Shots, an investigative article published in Slate in 2015 that exposed the truth behind the police execution of Chicago teen Laquan McDonald, and the 2016 series Code of Silence from The Intercept that detailed a massive criminal enterprise within the Chicago Police Department and the institutional conditions that allowed it to flourish for more than a decade.
In 2024, the Invisible Institute won Pulitzer Prizes for Missing in Chicago, a two-year investigation into how Chicago police handle the cases of missing Black girls and women, and You Didn’t See Nothin, a podcast revisiting a 1997 hate crime.
Check out the below introduction to the Civic Police Data Project, an open source data tool that enables the public to explore police disciplinary records through interactive graphs and maps, individual officer profiles and underlying documents and reports.