Chicago Justice Podcast

Covering issues of crime and violence is very hard but that is no excuse for not doing it better. So says our guest this week on the Chicago Justice Show Jason Cherkis. Cherkis is seasoned reporter who started out working for weekly paper in Washington, DC covering these very issues. Through be told reporters at daily papers and local TV stations have never really covered crime and violence respon...

The coverage of justice issues in Chicago overall has and continues to be a huge problem for the Chicago media. The hyper-concentration on gun violence and the daily tally of shootings has taken center stage across the various mediums for which Chicagoans can consume news. The legacy outlets also have to compete with agenda driven political operations that camouflaging themselves as media operatio...

  This episode features a discussion with Sharon Fairley who is a professor from practice at the University of Chicago Law School a, former federal prosecutor, and the former chief administrator of the Independent Police Review Authority (IPRA) and Civilian Office of Police Accountability (COPA). We discuss Sharon’s recent commentary published by the Chicago Tribune titled “Commen...

  Disaggregating the various functions of modern police agencies provides us the basis to start to reimagine how we might go about building better systems of layered responses to the social problems we have for too long left at the feet of policing agencies in American. Today’s episode features our Facebook Live conversation with Professor Barry Friedman from New York University Law School an...

In today’s episode we discuss the abuse suffered by credentialed media at the hands of local police forces. While police actions responding to protests have always been called in to question the ferociousness behind the abuse by municipal police departments across the county to local and national news outlets sure seemed different this time around. Today CJP Executive Director Tracy Siska an...

On May 15th several mainstream media outlets each published their own interview with CPD Superintendent David Brown in what can only be the result of a coordinated media strategy from the Department. When you review what was published by the various outlets they each make readers / viewers believe the interview was obtained through their labors rather than unwittingly, or knowingly and not caring,...

  Chicago’s Million Dollar Blocks is an amazing website that details over a five year period how much money the State of Illinois spends on incarcerating people per block in Chicago. In this episode we feature an interview with researcher and author Dr. Dan Cooper from the Metropolitan Planning Council, who together with his colleague Dr. Ryan Lugalia- Hollon and the technologists at Da...

  The Illinois Department of Corrections (IDOC) and their response to the COVID-19 pandemic is the subject of today’s episode. We feature excerpts from a Facebook Live interview we did with Jobi Cates, Founder and Executive Director of Reform Justice Illinois (RJI). RJI was originally created to work on issues solely focused on juvenile lifers, or people sentenced to life imprisonment f...

  In this episode we discuss the media coverage of the process used to select former Dallas Police Chief David Brown as the nominee for the permanent Superintendent of the Chicago Police Department. Our guest today is Beachwood Reporter Founder and Editor Steve Rhodes. On this episode we discuss the media coverage of the search conducted by the Chicago Police Board for potential candidates fo...