Lost & Found

Trina Reynolds-Tyler pored over thousands of pages of documents, searching for clues that would lead her to discover what she was searching for. What was she hoping to find? Hints as to why so many cases involving missing Black girls and women in Chicago go unsolved. 

For more than two years, Reynolds-Tyler, data director at the Invisible Institute, a nonprofit journalism production company on Chicago’s South Side that works to enhance the capacity of citizens to hold public institutions accountable, and City Bureau reporter Sarah Conway investigated how the Chicago Police Department (CPD) handles missing person cases. Through their research they learned that police officers were denying, delaying, or mishandling missing persons cases, which disproportionately affects Black Chicagoans. 

“Often when people think about police violence or police misconduct, they think about the stories that make it to the news,” said Reynolds-Tyler, who presented “Missing and Forgotten Women: Lost in the Shadows,” at the 30th Karen J. Honig Memorial Lecture on March 18, sponsored by the Jane Addams College of Social Work. “They don’t often think about the daily mundane encounters people have with police.” 

Using records that alleged police misconduct filed between the years 2011 to 2015 obtained through court order, Reynolds-Tyler and a group of volunteers were determined to learn how the complaints were connected, even though many of the victims did not know one another. Researchers were especially interested in cases involving sexual offenses, instances where individuals were sexually violated by law enforcement, domestic abuse where officers harmed an intimate partner, and instances where police allegedly mistreated an individual who sought help. As a data scientist, Reynolds-Tyler wanted to better understand why the violence was occurring. To do so, she organized the complaints into different categories. 

“We discovered the commonality was the majority of complaints were filed by Black women about their Black children, complaints alleging disrespect, delayed cases, and criminalization,” Reynolds-Tyler told those in attendance on the University of Illinois Chicago campus. “We identified 54 complaints related to the way Chicago police handled missing persons cases.” 

The investigation, dubbed “Missing in Chicago,” was developed into a seven-part series. It was the Invisible Institute’s first “Beneath the Surface” initiative, a data science project that examines the intersections of gender-based violence and policing. The two were awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 2024 for local reporting.  

Between the years 2000 and 2021, Black people represented nearly two-thirds of missing persons cases, Reynolds-Tyler said. A closer examination discovered that the majority of cases were Black children, specifically Black girls between the ages of 10 to 20. While Black girls that age represented 2% of the population, they constituted 30% of the cases during that time. 

Chicago Police classified 99.8% of missing persons cases as “not criminal in nature” from 2000 to 2021. That number, Reynolds-Tyler said, was disputed by The Invisible Institute. Eleven cases were miscategorized as “closed non-criminal” in the missing persons data, but they were likely homicides, more than doubling the number of official killings in missing persons’ police data. 

“These 11 cases were part of a much larger pattern of neglect,” Reynolds-Tyler said. 

Many young people are oftentimes running from something – family conflict and abuse; mental health issues; school and social issues; seeking independence or belonging. The Department of Children and Family Services (DCFS) states that someone who goes on the run has a higher likelihood of experiencing human trafficking, and that young people and children “do not always perceive themselves as victims, making them very easy to manipulate,” Reynolds-Tyler said.  

“In our reporting, we saw that missingness was related to gun violence, intimate partner abuse, substance use abuse, human trafficking, inadequate housing, and a host of other issues,” she said. 

During their investigation, Reynolds-Tyler and her colleagues did not rely solely on data. They also interviewed social workers, current and former police officials, national experts, and impacted families to learn why Black girls went missing. The common denominator revealed a pattern of neglect, incompetence, and illegal behavior. 

“These people who had never met before were somehow telling the same stories,” she said.  

The numerous interviews provided Reynolds-Tyler and her team with a plethora of information. But they wanted to dig deeper. They analyzed 911 calls related to missing persons’ cases, in addition to data from the Cook County Sheriff’s Missing Persons Project, Cook County Medical Examiner, and Chicago Missing Persons. The goal was to learn how missing persons cases are conducted from beginning to end. 

“Sarah and I spoke with so many families. It was incredibly heavy but incredibly rewarding to carry these stories in this seven-part series and create an opportunity for other people to see themselves in their families in these stories,” Reynolds-Tyler said. 

Under the Missing Persons Identification Act, it is illegal for law enforcement in Illinois to refuse to take a missing person’s report or impose waiting periods. Police must accept reports immediately, regardless of the person’s age, suspected foul play, or length of time missing. Numerous families spoke with Reynolds-Tyler and her colleagues about delays in their cases.  

One family recounted how their 20-year-old daughter was in fear of her life after witnessing the murder of her boyfriend. The girl went missing after attending the funeral and a gathering at the house of her boyfriend’s mother. When the girl’s mother suspected something was wrong when she didn’t return, she filed a missing person’s report. The police said to wait 24 hours, as she may have run away. Two days after accepting a missing person’s report, the girl’s naked body was found in a garage, and her death was declared undetermined. The mother felt her daughter would still be alive if the police had listened to her. 

Reynolds-Tyler said if anything is to be taken away from her presentation is that “people should think about how systems interact with one another. Think about setting a record so that people who come after you can know they are not alone. Set that record so that we can create better policy, and better find each other, better see each other, because we cannot bring these people back.”