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This story is being copublished by Invisible Institute and the Chicago Reader
The Chicago Police Department has rewritten an internal policy that allowed officers to easily close missing persons cases they did not solve.
This new policy, finalized in February and obtained through a public records request by Invisible Institute, follows reporting by Invisible Institute and City Bureau that found Chicago police officers had lied about speaking with missing persons—most of them Black women and girls—who were later found dead. In many of these cases, officers wrote that family members had told them the missing person had returned.
In one case, of 16-year-old Desiree Robinson, officers filed a report that said a missing girl had been found, closing the case. In reality, she was being trafficked and was later murdered.
The three-page policy had not been updated in over a decade and contained few provisions outlining which investigative steps officers must take, or how they are required to communicate with the families of missing persons. Now 20 pages fatter, the policy requires officers to see missing persons with their own eyes before declaring them found and prevents them from closing a case because they’ve exhausted their leads or believe the person dead.
CPD officers seemingly exploited these loopholes to close cases, falsely inflating the department’s clearance rate. Crime clearance rates and associated statistics are a perennial pressure point for the department, and CPD and its individual supervisors are pressed to improve these numbers, which often does not correspond to improved policing.
Take the case of Linzene Franklin, which was detailed in the 2023 Pulitzer Prize–winning series “Missing in Chicago” cowritten by Invisible Institute director of data trina reynolds-tyler and Reader editor-in-chief Sarah Conway. Franklin was reported missing in 2011, died of a heart attack at a bus stop two years later in 2013, and was reported found by CPD in 2014. No CPD officer was ever disciplined for lying on the report.
The Chicago Alliance Against Sexual Exploitation (CAASE) is cautiously supportive of the department’s new policy. CAASE’s executive director, Elizabeth Payne, praised one move to add clear definitions for different categories of missing people: “At risk missing” (an umbrella category including missing children, elderly people, people with disabilities, and victims of catastrophe) and “high-risk missing” (cases of stranger abduction, people in need of medical attention, and those who disappeared under suspicious, unknown, or dangerous circumstances). Discrete definitions and procedures could save lives.
“Whenever you have loose terminology, you’re going to run into problems where if something doesn’t need to be designated as high-risk, then it won’t be,” Payne said.
One change concerns Payne. CPD’s five underresourced Special Investigations Units will investigate all missing persons cases in their geographic jurisdiction. Units used to handling sensitive crimes of sexual abuse could bring trained eyes to these high-risk missing persons cases, but Payne worries that putting extra work on the backs of overburdened detectives could also slow the investigative process. Though the Special Investigations Units have handled at least some of these cases in the past, it is unclear what percentage of these cases they were responsible for, and how many more cases they will take on under this policy. CPD did not respond to a request for comment.
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Advocates interviewed by Invisible Institute and City Bureau in 2023 said that CPD should create a specialized standalone unit just for missing persons.
Additional reporting by María Inés Zamudio and Sam Stecklow, Invisible Institute
Mariana Quezada reported this story as part of a Scripps Howard Fund internship with Invisible Institute. She is now a reporter for Telemundo Cincinnati.
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