The requirement was instituted as part of a broad police reform package passed in 2015 in the wake of the police killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo.
After deaths at the hands of law enforcement in Illinois, agencies are required to “publicly release a report” if no charges are brought against the officers.
Tucked into the 174-page law is a key provision — one paragraph long — intended to dictate how law enforcement communicates to the public when police kill. Experts say vague wording in that single paragraph has resulted in a patchwork system across the state.
Of the 15 largest counties in Illinois, three appear to fail to meet this requirement: Will, Madison and St. Clair.
In Will County, in particular, there is little transparency — or consistency.
State’s Attorney Jim Glasgow, who has largely occupied the office since 1992, released letters with his legal conclusions in three deaths at the hands of police officers after the law was passed. Since 2020, though, Glasgow seems to have shifted the responsibilities for publicly communicating his office’s findings to the Will/Grundy Major Crimes Task Force, an obscure investigative body that only releases information upon request.
The Task Force, made up of officers from agencies throughout Will and Grundy counties, has investigated police shootings since 2016.
But the Task Force’s responsibility is to conduct a thorough investigation — not come to a legal conclusion about whether an officer violated the law when committing a fatal shooting or being involved in an in-custody death.
At least eight cases that would have received a detailed written legal review in other counties have led to legal claims being filed.
The only way for journalists and members of the public to obtain the reports is to file records requests, sometimes with multiple agencies. Experts like Loren Jones, of the Chicago nonprofit Impact for Equity, say that the lack of transparency makes it unclear whether Will County is fully complying with the law.
The inconsistencies are “extremely troubling,” Jones said. At the same time, the lack of clarity in the law makes it difficult to challenge an agency walking the line of meeting its “bare minimum” requirements.
The county’s practices end up leaving families of victims of police violence in the dark, said Trista Graves Brown, a Joliet activist and resident whose family friend, Jamal Smith, was killed by Joliet police in 2023. Police often say they can’t share information because of active investigations, she said.
“But how long is the investigation? A year? Two years?
“How long is it that you can never show the truth?” she asked. “How long does a family got to wait?”
***
Over his three decades in office, State’s Attorney James Glasgow has established himself as a law-and-order prosecutor — regularly trading on his prosecution of Drew Peterson, the former Bolingbrook police sergeant convicted of murdering one of his wives.
It would be one of the only prosecutions of a police officer Glasgow ever filed; he has never filed charges against an officer in a police shooting or in-custody death.
Glasgow projects a tough image to the world. With a shock of thick white hair and matching mustache, and an endless supply of pinstripe suits with silk handkerchiefs, he looks almost out of central casting for an old-school tough-on-crime prosecutor. He was recently reelected to his seventh term — running unopposed.
In recent years, Glasgow publicly opposed criminal justice reforms at the state level, unsuccessfully challenging the SAFE-T Act’s bail provisions.
“He [is] a policeman’s prosecutor,” said Illinois Association of Chiefs of Police (ILACP) president Marc Maton upon awarding Glasgow with the ILACP’s Public Official of the Year award in August. Maton is the chief of police of Lemont.
Maton added, “He is always on our side.”
***
When 30-year-old Marcus Mays died at the Will County jail in November 2018, his case became one of the first subject to the new requirements in Will County.
Mays, who had epilepsy, informed the jail’s private medical provider of his condition when he was booked, according to a lawsuit filed by his estate. But both jail and medical employees failed to ensure that proper medications were on-site or schedule any medical appointments for Mays. After a week of being off of his medications, he suffered a massive seizure in his cell and died.
By the next meeting of the Task Force’s executive committee, on December 18, the case appears to have been closed. Buried in the “announcements” section of the meeting’s minutes is an oblique reference: “In-custody Death Investigation at WCADF – Apparent medical issue. No criminal charges.” It was the first reference to any such case in the committee’s minutes.
However, information about what happened to Mays has never been publicly communicated, even as the lawsuit brought by his estate has dragged on. The county has denied wrongdoing but is taking part in settlement negotiations.
And outside of two sentences in the task force’s meeting minutes, denoting that “no criminal charges” will be brought, there’s no evidence to show for any review — let alone a publicly released report. Torreya Hamilton, the attorney for Mays’s estate, said she was unfamiliar with any review Glasgow’s office conducted, and in response to a records request, the office stated that “no records have been located.”
The first “publicly release[d]” report wouldn’t come until the February 2019 fatal shooting of Bruce Carter Jr. by Joliet police, which resulted in an 11-page letter released 90 days later. Citing a “split-second decision,” Glasgow found that the officer did not violate state law.
It is the most detailed explanation he ever released.
That next shooting occurred when Joliet police killed Nakia Smith during a hostage standoff. However, Glasgow would not release his letter clearing the officer — this time just three full pages — until nearly a full year later.
***
In the time between Smith’s killing and Glasgow’s findings being released, two tragedies occurred. First, in January 2020, Eric Lurry died in the back seat of a Joliet Police car.
The complete details of that case would not fully come to light until the second event occurred: the murder of George Floyd in May 2020.
A month after George Floyd’s murder, the first allegations of misconduct in the Joliet Police’s involvement in Lurry’s death broke. Leaked video shows Joliet officers held Lurry’s nose closed and put a baton in his mouth after he had ingested some baggies of drugs.
The day after the video’s publication, Glasgow released his public pronouncement on the case: two paragraphs clearing unnamed Joliet officers and blaming Lurry’s death on drugs in his system. The finding led to protests at Glasgow’s office.
It would be his last public statement on a police killing. Since then, there has been silence from Glasgow and a shift of responsibility for public communication to the Task Force and local police departments.
The next public communication would come in May 2021 from Will County Sheriff’s Office Deputy Chief Dan Jungles, who ran the task force at the time.
Statements released by Jungles and Will County Assistant State’s Attorney Carole Cheney suggested that because charges had been filed against Cordairel Whitmore and not the Joliet officer who shot him, the public should infer that the officer was cleared. The statements don’t directly address whether Glasgow had come to any legal conclusions about the shooting.
For the next three years after, no public statements were made by law enforcement about the findings of any shootings or in-custody deaths in Will County. The silence continued until an article appeared in Joliet Patch in February 2024 about the fatal shooting of Victor Harris by Joliet police. Again, no report accompanied the story.
That story was published days after Invisible Institute sent questions to the State’s Attorney’s Office about whether it was complying with the legal requirement that reports must be “publicly release[d].”
The Task Force reports that replaced Glasgow’s detailed legal analysis in the Carter case that were later released by the Task Force were each two pages and merely summarized aspects of the investigation.
The SAO’s new official findings, sent to the Task Force’s commander, each consisted of one nearly identical sentence: “Based on a thorough review of” the case files, an assistant state’s attorney wrote, “there is no basis to prosecute the law enforcement officer.”
When asked if releasing records through FOIA complies with the public reporting requirement, Cheney didn’t respond.
Jones said she doubts it. “If you are required to do a FOIA request to receive the information, it has not been publicly released,” she said. “It’s a public document, but it’s not publicly available.”
Even with the release of information about Harris, at least 14 fatal police shootings or in-custody deaths in Will County have gone without any report or explanation about why officers were not charged with a crime.
***
Experts don’t expect much to change about the system in Illinois until the language in the law is clarified. That’s because it’s simply too vague, Jones said.
The scant records released for cases after 2020 appear to comply with neither the spirit of the law, nor best practices, said Wake Forest law professor Eileen Prescott.
“The report needs to provide enough detail to understand the basis for the decision not to prosecute,” she wrote in an email.
“It probably should include reasoning in favor of not taking further action, as well as the facts supporting that reasoning,” she continued. “I don’t believe that merely releasing an email that says, ‘the SAO found no basis to prosecute the officer’ would comply with the report requirement.”
Neither Attorney General Kwame Raoul nor State Sen. Elgie Sims, Jr., who each carried the bill while serving in the state Senate and House, respectively, responded to multiple requests for comment.
However, both the Cook and Winnebago county state’s attorney’s offices’ policies detail that their offices are responsible for public communications about legal findings.
When presented with reporters’ findings, Will County Board Member Jacqueline Traynere called for “a lot of transparency anytime an officer is involved in a shooting.”
Without further legislation, Jones said, there will continue to be no real “parameters” around the true role and responsibility of prosecutors in communicating their decisions to not file charges when Illinoisans are killed by police. That ultimately leaves “a gap for clarity, timeliness and transparency about officer-related deaths for the public,” she said.
If an officer is being cleared for their fatal shooting, “they should never have a problem exposing who did it, why they did it, and how they did it — because they did it,” said Brown.
“If you have nothing to hide, you shouldn’t have a problem with that.”
A version of this story was originally published by Invisible Institute and IPM News
This story was supported by the Data-Driven Reporting Project and the Center for Community News.
Sam Stecklow is an investigative journalist with Invisible Institute. Email him at sam@invisibleinstitute.com.
Chris Weber is a freelance journalist and graduate student. He reported this story with Invisible Institute through the Governors State University Center for Community Media.
