Sangamon County Sheriff says she will increase vetting for deputies after Sonya Massey killing

The newly appointed Sangamon County sheriff plans to file records requests to obtain information from public agencies that have employed applicants for jobs as county deputies and correctional officers.

Sheriff Paula Crouch also said she will mandate in-person visits to current and past employers, when possible, as part of a more-thorough background check after the 2023 hiring of former Sangamon County sheriff’s deputy Sean Grayson, who shot and killed Sonya Massey, an unarmed Black woman, in her home July 6.

“My thinking is to have a step-by-step background process,” Crouch told Illinois Times after an Oct. 15 meeting of the Sangamon County Board’s Jail Committee. “I know the sheriff before me did have a background process. I’m just kind of making it more in-depth.”

Crouch said not all of the planned improvements have been finalized, including expanding the role of the Sangamon County Sheriff Merit Commission in vetting candidates. She told the committee she will make a presentation in the next month or two outlining the changes and will consider any suggestions.

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New proposed rules would lower the bar for stripping police officers of their badges in Illinois

Photo: Capitol News Illinois photo by Jerry Nowicki

After lengthy delays, Illinois police regulators are one step closer to strengthening their ability to strip officers of their certification to work in law enforcement. The move aims to prevent officers who commit misconduct at one agency from simply moving on to another — a phenomenon sometimes called “wandering cops.”

Regulators with the Illinois Law Enforcement Training and Standards Board (ILETSB) released draft administrative rules earlier this month that will allow the agency to begin tackling hundreds of cases in which a police department, prosecutor’s office or member of the public has filed a complaint seeking to strip a police officer of their certification. 

The regulations are the first step in implementing several provisions around police decertification included in the 2021 criminal justice reform SAFE-T Act. The process has been “stalled” for years, according to Impact for Equity, a Chicago-based law and policy nonprofit organization.

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WBEZ's Curious City: The unsung legacy of Margaret Burroughs: “We called her mama”

As a high school senior in Chicago, I got to tell you, when it comes to Black history, the only people who I really learned about in school were Emmett Till, Martin Luther King and Rosa Parks. Oh, and Harriet Tubman.

But if I was teaching history, I’d tell you about Dr. Margaret T.G. Burroughs, or as I like to call her, Dr. B.

She was a powerhouse. She helped start the South Side Community Art Center when she was only 23 years old. In 1959, she started the DuSable Black History Museum in her own home. She even has art in the Art Institute of Chicago.

But I didn’t learn this in school. To find out about Dr. B, I had to go to a special summer program at Illinois Humanities that became an all-year program at the Invisible Institute. The other young folks in the program and I went through her archives at South Side Community Art Center and read Our Girl Tuesday, a zine about her legacy. We started calling ourselves the Burroughs Scholars.

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Police employment history is usually a public record. In Alabama, it’s a state secret.

In a wave of criminal justice reforms passed after George Floyd’s murder by police in Minneapolis, Alabama lawmakers created a secret statewide database to track misconduct and complaints against police officers.

The bill “gives us the tools and opportunity to ensure bad actors from community and state law enforcement agencies are held accountable and don’t end up hopping from one department to the next,” Rep. Neil Rafferty (D-Birmingham), one of the bill’s co-sponsors, said shortly after filing it.

This database was intended as a tool for local law enforcement agencies to track potential misconduct histories of officers they hired from other agencies, often known as lateral transfer officers. To that end, it collects information about some use of force complaints about them, and about officers who were fired or resigned while under investigation.

However, the bill made use of force and disciplinary data off-limits from public access, and it blocks Alabamians from being able to access even simpler data: the professional employment history of the police officers who are certified by the Alabama Peace Officers Standards & Training Commission (APOSTC). A national report found that Alabama’s was one of only two state-level police databases created as part of the post-George Floyd reforms that is entirely off-limits from public access.

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In about-face, Montana blocks access to basic police data

In 2022, Montana’s policing regulators at the Public Safety Officers Standards and Training Council, or POST, received a request for basic information that the board had released before: the names of the law enforcement officers that POST certifies to work in Montana, and their public employers.

It’s simple data that most states around the country release. Montana, up until that point, counted itself among them, having provided the data to journalists at least twice before: In 2017 to a reporter with the Scripps News Washington Bureau, and in 2019 to Invisible Institute, a Chicago-based journalism nonprofit. 

However, this new request, from a reporter with the Associated Press, was different. Not because the content or context of the request were significantly different, but because the political environment at POST had undergone seismic shifts.

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HALF THE STORY

After the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police in 2020, lawmakers in Massachusetts took an action that advocates had been pushing since at least 2010: creating a system to certify — and decertify — police officers. For decades, Massachusetts had been part of a small outlier of states that had no mechanism to prevent a police officer, once trained, from getting hired after they’d been fired or forced out of another agency for misconduct.

“This bill will allow police departments to make better-informed recruitment and hiring choices while improving accountability,” said then Lt. Gov. Karyn Polito when the bill was filed.

The new agency that oversees that system, the Massachusetts Peace Officer Standards and Training (POST) Commission, has been going through the process of recertifying thousands of existing officers throughout Massachusetts, collecting some disciplinary data about them, and publishing that information on its website. An early peer-reviewed study, using the historical and newly-collected data to look at the impacts of the law, found that it resulted in a reduction of certain kinds of sustained complaints, including about use of force, and suggested that the reforms could be having a “deterrent” effect on misconduct.

“We know that our mandate is about transparency,” POST director Enrique Zuniga said in an interview last year. 

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September 12, 2024 Missouri is home of police decertification. It also keeps data showing wandering officers a secret.

On July 4, 2023, Samuel Davis, a 26-year-old officer for the Northwoods Police Department in North St. Louis County, took Charles Garmon into custody at a Walgreens. After handcuffing Garmon, Davis drove him to a remote intersection outside of a Pepsi bottling plant in Kinloch, a now-largely industrial city of under 300 residents, some four miles and five municipalities from Northwoods.

Outside of the Pepsi plant, Davis pepper sprayed Garmon, beat him with a baton — breaking his jaw — and “told Garmon not to return to Northwoods,” according to a federal civil rights lawsuit Garmon later filed. 

Rather than then transport him to any kind of facility where he could then receive treatment, Davis left Garmon in a field on the side of the road for someone else to find, leading to a 911 call, Davis’s identification, a warrant being issued, and his eventual arrest on felony assault and kidnapping charges two weeks later. (Davis’s supervisor, Michael Hill, was also arrested, and both have also since been indicted on federal civil rights charges.)

Within a few weeks, local TV station KMOV found that in his short career, Davis had already jumped to the Northwoods police from the North County Cooperative Police Department, something reporters found using a roster from that department. 

“Tracking other departments Davis may have worked at isn’t easy in Missouri,” the station noted. “The state doesn’t have a central system for the public to see if an officer has moved around. The only way to know is to ask each department if an officer worked there.”

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Thin blue lies: The Cook County state’s attorney’s Brady list is missing more than 100 cops who made false or misleading statements

On an early summer evening in August 2020, Jonathan Ridgner, a Black cop in his second year on the force, and his white partner, Nicholas Abramson, were driving through Humboldt Park in their squad car when they spotted 26-year-old Leroy Kennedy IV, who is Black, sitting against the wall near a corner store with some acquaintances. Upon seeing the cops pass, Kennedy’s body stiffened and his eyes “enlarged,” according to the arrest report Ridgner authored that day. 

Ridgner said that was enough for them to suspect Kennedy was concealing a weapon. 

Ridgner jumped out of the vehicle and chased after Kennedy on foot. As he approached, he claims Kennedy flailed his arms and yelled, “Don’t touch me,” before slapping the cop’s hands multiple times. That amounted to battering a police officer, a criminal offense, Ridgner wrote in the original police report. For this reason, he used an “emergency takedown,” grabbing Kennedy “by the collar” and throwing him to the ground. 

After leaving the scene because a “hostile” crowd had started to form around them, he searched Kennedy and found nothing on the young man aside from a few credit cards and a cell phone.

Two of their superiors, Lieutenant Kevin Keefe and Sergeant Nicholas Urban, later signed off on their use-of-force reports. After watching the body camera footage and listening to audio of Kennedy’s arrest, they claimed to have observed nothing untoward.

But an investigation of the incident by the Civilian Office of Police Accountability (COPA), released in August 2022, identified glaring holes and “willfully misleading” statements in the officers’ narratives. Investigators found that Ridgner and Abramson unjustly stopped Kennedy, whose actions they deemed innocuous. They said Ridgner used excessive force by grabbing Kennedy around the throat—not by the collar—before slamming him face down on the sidewalk pavement, which left him dizzy and with multiple welts and bruises on the right side of his face. COPA also found the two officers crafted a story to justify the attack while laughing about it in their car afterward.

COPA ultimately sustained findings of violations of the CPD’s Rule 14—which prohibits officers from making false statements—and recommended all four be fired.

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Before killing Sonya Massey, Sean Grayson had a case thrown out after bringing charges with no evidence. Departments kept hiring him

Kyle Adkins was leaving his parents’ house in Kincaid, a small village in central Illinois’ Christian County, to pick up his young children from their mother’s house, just a few blocks away, on the night of May 8, 2021. 

Kincaid Police Officer Sean Grayson pulled him over — but he wasn’t sure why.

Grayson told Adkins there was a warrant out for his arrest and issued him a Notice to Appear, a document equivalent to an arrest, recommending felony drug charges against him. The case dragged out for two years before it was dropped, and a new investigation reveals the warrant — and other evidence Grayson said he had against Adkins — never actually existed. Body camera footage shows Grayson admitting to the chief of police he had no evidence to recommend charges, but even after the footage surfaced in court, no other department or agency was notified. 

This story is a collaboration between Invisible Institute, IPM Newsroom, and Illinois Times

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Will CPD’s response to the DNC bring more of the same violence?

On May 4, students and organizers set up tents outside of the Art Institute of Chicago and hung a sign that read, “Free Palestine.” Following protests on college campuses across the country, the Gaza solidarity encampment formed to demand the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC) divest from the Israeli government amid its ongoing assault on Gaza. 

Within 30 minutes, officers issued an arrest warning and began blocking demonstrators from leaving, according to a statement later released by the People’s Art Institute, the collective responsible for the encampment. Protesters locked arms to defend the encampment and each other, standing in confrontation with officers for hours. 

Throughout the day, hundreds of people joined the demonstration in the North Garden of the private museum in downtown Chicago. The Chicago Police Department (CPD) set up barricades to contain the protest. 

Officers eventually broke through the human chain and pulled students from the encampment, pushing them to the ground and arresting them while their belongings remained scattered around the garden. Students were “slammed into the ground, hit, kneeled and stepped on, and dragged,” the People’s Art Institute said in its statement. Two people had to be taken to the hospital.

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‘We will not protect you’ - Invisible Institute reporters on police misconduct in 2020 and the holes in police accountability

NEW in the Chicago Reader: Invisible Institute's Erisa Apantaku, Andrew Fan, Dana Brozost-Kelleher, Maheen Khan and Isra Rahman published an investigation into officers accused of misconduct during the summer of 2020 and the outcome of discipline cases. 

On the final day of May in 2020, at the height of demonstrations against police violence that gripped cities nationwide after the murder of George Floyd, protesters filmed a violent scene at the corner of Clark and Hubbard in Chicago’s River North neighborhood. Amid a confrontation with protesters, roughly a dozen Chicago police officers beat demonstrators, striking some with batons as they tried to escape and others as they fell to the ground.

A video provided to the Invisible Institute shows an officer named Richard Bankus approach one of the people on the ground. Bankus raises his baton and strikes the man, appearing to hit him in the head. As he’s hit, the protester on the ground backs away from Bankus, trying to avoid additional blows.

All the while, Sergeant Zachary Rubald stands directly behind Bankus, looking on. The scene unfolding in front of him is serious. Chicago Police Department (CPD) policy forbids officers from hitting people with batons unless they are attacking or threatening to attack officers or others. Even more, baton strikes to the head qualify as deadly force and are never allowed against nonviolent protesters. As a sergeant, Rubald is responsible for ensuring officers follow CPD rules and for reporting any misconduct he witnesses. 

Instead, Rubald turns and walks away; he never reports the incident.

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Sangamon County Sheriff defends hiring of Sean Grayson. Experts say he was negligent and missed red flags

The Sangamon County Sheriff’s Office hired now former deputy Sean Grayson despite his history of policing at five other police departments in 3 years, serious misconduct in the military and integrity issues at former jobs. 

Experts say this combination of issues should have been a glaring warning about Grayson as a candidate. 

“In this particular circumstance, there were enough red flags or things that you go, wow, there’s a problem here,” said Chris Burbank, a former longtime chief of the Salt Lake City Police Department. 

In an interview conducted August 1, Sangamon County Sheriff Jack Campbell defended his agency’s vetting of Grayson. Campbell, 60, has said he won’t resign amid public criticism in the wake of the shooting death of Sonya Massey, a Black woman, at the hand of Grayson, who is white.

Grayson has been charged with first-degree murder, aggravated battery with a firearm and official misconduct after shooting and killing Massey in her home in the early morning hours of July 6 after she called for help thinking there was a prowler outside her home in the Cabbage Patch neighborhood of unincorporated Sangamon County, just outside Springfield. 

Invisible Institute, IPM News, and Illinois Times obtained Grayson’s personnel file and application materials through a public records request to the Sangamon County Sheriff’s Office. After reviewing these records, Burbank said he believes the Sheriff’s Office was negligent in hiring Grayson. 

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Image: Dean Olsen / Illinois Times

ProPublica Selects Three Newsroom Partners for the Local Reporting Network

ProPublica has selected three partner newsrooms to work with its Local Reporting Network over the next three years. Each of the participating local media partners — Arizona Luminaria, Invisible Institute and the New York Amsterdam News — will dedicate a reporter for a three-year term to focus solely on investigative reporting, in collaboration with ProPublica’s editors and specialized teams. This project is made possible by a grant from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation.

“Over the last six years, the Local Reporting Network has delivered critical reporting to communities across the country and prompted real-life changes,” ProPublica Assistant Managing Editor Sarah Blustain said. “With the support from the Knight Foundation, we’re excited to be able to support more sustained partnerships with these three newsrooms, all of which have a demonstrated track record of investigative reporting. We’re thrilled to get started.”

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Deputy who killed Sonya Massey joined Sangamon County Sheriff after past employers questioned his integrity and conduct

Sean Grayson, the former sheriff’s deputy facing murder charges for killing Sonya Massey in Sangamon County, Illinois, left a previous agency after complaints were filed against him for claims of inappropriate conduct with a female detainee and retaliation against her boyfriend after she filed a complaint. 

Invisible Institute, Illinois Public Media and the Investigative Reporting Workshop obtained new records from the Logan County Sheriff’s Office, where Grayson worked for 11 months prior to Sangamon County, that show department officials concluded Grayson ignored internal policies during a high-speed chase, fielded at least two formal complaints about his behavior and told him directly that they had considered firing him.

These records also include audio recordings from a November 2022 interview between Grayson and Logan County’s chief deputy which suggest the department — as well as other police departments that had employed him — were previously aware of issues with his performance and integrity as an officer. 

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Deputy accused of killing Sonya Massey in Springfield was discharged from U.S. Army for serious misconduct

Sean Grayson, the former Sangamon County Sheriff’s deputy now charged with murder in the fatal shooting of Sonya Massey, was previously discharged from the U.S. Army for serious misconduct, military records show.

Grayson, who is white, was indicted by a grand jury in the July 6 death of Massey, who is Black. Ben Crump, the family’s attorney, said the U.S. Department of Justice has also opened an investigation into the incident, but the agency said in a statement that it is “assessing the circumstances” and following the criminal case.

Documents obtained from the Kincaid Police Department, where Grayson previously worked, note that he was discharged in 2016 for “Misconduct (Serious Offense)” at the Fort Riley Army installation in Kansas. Army officials confirmed Grayson was a wheeled vehicle mechanic from May 2014 to February 2016, but declined to provide further details about his discharge. 

“The Privacy Act and (Department of Defense) policy prevent us from releasing information relating to the misconduct of low-level employees or characterization of service at discharge,” Army spokesman Bryce S. Dubee wrote in an email. Officials at Fort Riley did not return voicemails seeking comment.

Anthony Ghiotto, a former Air Force prosecutor who now teaches law at the University of Illinois, said there are several reasons why a service member could receive this type of discharge, including as a potential result of a court-martial conviction, in lieu of a court-martial proceeding, or if they commit a civilian infraction that can’t be disciplined through the military justice system. He said this kind of discharge suggests that Grayson committed an offense equivalent to something that would have led to at least a year of incarceration for a civilian.

“A good way of looking at it is, if it would be a misdemeanor in the civilian world, it’s not going to be a ‘serious offense,’” he said.

Full story - Reporting by Farrah Anderson and Sam Stecklow, for Invisible Institute and the Investigative Reporting Workshop

The Invisible Institute: Balancing accolades and innovation

“I feel like I’ve been running a marathon,” says Trina Reynolds-Tyler, the data director at the Invisible Institute.

Reynolds-Tyler, along with her colleagues and reporting partners, has been on the run ever since the Chicago-based nonprofit newsroom made headlines by winning two Pulitzer Prizes and a Peabody award in early May. It’s been a whirlwind of collecting awards, doing press interviews and speaking at conferences to talk about their unique and deeply community-centric reporting process.

The 13-person newsroom is dedicated to human rights reporting and earned their latest awards for two different projects done in partnership with other media outlets. “You Didn’t See Nothin,” a podcast series produced by the Invisible Institute in partnership with USG Audio, earned a Pulitzer and a Peabody for audio investigation and delved into a historic case of a hate crime in Chicago that left deep wounds in the community.

Reynolds-Tyler earned the local reporting Pulitzer for “Missing in Chicago,” an investigation that she co-wrote with Sarah Conway of City Bureau, another non-profit newsroom in Chicago whose founders are alums of the Invisible Institute.

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Urbana activists want more police oversight. But local laws hold the civilian review board hostage

Ricardo Diaz joined the Urbana Civilian Police Review Board in 2011, hoping to bring change to policing in the city of 40,000.

When he moved to Urbana to start a job with the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, he reached out to the city to see how he could help the local immigrant population, as an immigrant to the U.S. himself. That’s when he was recruited to join the Urbana Civilian Police Review Board, which needed members.

Although police oversight wasn’t what he initially bargained for, he thought serving on the CPRB could impact how police treated residents, including immigrants. 

But over the years, as Diaz learned more about the board and its limitations, he says, he “woke up.” Now, Diaz says the board’s power is sharply curtailed. 

The CPRB operates on an uncommon model. Complaints about Urbana police and staff are first investigated by the department itself. Once the investigation is complete, the Chief of Police decides on next steps — including whether to order additional training or discipline. 

If the complainant decides to appeal that decision, only then does the CPRB start a review. 

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Yohance Lacour on NPR Fresh Air

Yohance joins Tonya Mosley on NPR’s Fresh Air to discuss the award-winning podcast You Didn’t See Nothin. Yohance Lacour tells the story of Lenard Clark, a 13-year-old Black boy who was beaten into a coma after riding his bike into a predominantly white neighborhood — and the importance of the case today.

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Wisconsin is in the minority of states shielding police data. We’re suing to change that.

This story is being co-published by the Wisconsin Examiner and Invisible Institute, a nonprofit public accountability journalism organization based in Chicago.

Since 2017, Wisconsin policing regulators have tracked what they call “flagged officers”: cops who get fired, resign in lieu of a termination, or resign before an investigation into alleged misconduct can be completed.

The regulators, with the Law Enforcement Standards Board (LESB), were prompted by a series of reports on officers accused of sexual assault and dishonesty who had been able to get rehired — including as a police chief — with little oversight from the state. 

“What we’re trying to do is eliminate the opportunity for somebody to slip through the cracks,” the chair of the LESB said at the time, referring to a phenomenon often called “wandering officers.”

Seven years in, it’s difficult to see what has changed: Because flagged officers can still be hired, they often are — and at an increasing rate, according to recent reporting. And because the flagged officers list is limited to only some officers who were disciplined or resigned, there is still potential for additional officers with histories of misconduct to have slipped through the cracks to new agencies undetected.

Read the full article by Sam Stecklow

Invisible Institute wins seven Peter Lisagor Awards

The Chicago Headline Club congratulates all the winners of the 47th annual Peter Lisagor Awards for exemplary journalism.

The awards were handed out May 10 at a gathering of more than 200 members of the local media community. The entries were judged by an impartial Society of Professional Journalists chapter outside Illinois.

Invisible Institute received seven awards across three different journalism projects.

Missing in Chicago, our seven-part investigation into Chicago police handling of missing person cases in collaboration with City Bureau, received 4 awards for Best multimedia collaboration, Best use of feature video, Best reporting on crime and justice by a small newsroom, Best reporting on race and diversity by a small newsroom.

You Didn’t See Nothin, our audio investigative podcast revisiting the 1990s hate crime against Lenard Clark in the Bridgeport neighborhood of Chicago in partnership with USG Audio, received two awards for Best feature reporting series by a small newsroom and Best investigative reporting by a small newsroom.

Jamie Kalven’s reporting, See No Evil: Why Does the Chicago Police Department Tolerate Abusive Racists in Its Ranks? published in The Intercept, received the Best reporting on race and diversity by a large newsroom.

See full list of award winners