Pattern of Abuse: Chicago Police Department’s History of Sexual Misconduct

The Invisible Institute published an investigation that found a pattern of the Chicago Police Department failing to vigorously investigate accusations of sexual assault  by officers. Our analysis of police records show that claims were often downplayed or ignored, sometimes allowing officers to abuse again and again.

This reporting is a collaboration with ProPublica and you can read the story on their website. It was also published in the Chicago Sun-Times and online.

Our reporting team, which included Isabelle Senechal, Maheen Khan, and Andrew Fan, spent a year reviewing more than 300 complaints accusing Chicago police officers of sexual assault and misconduct stretching back to the early 2000s. 

This analysis identified 14 officers who may be repeat offenders, having been accused of sexual assault in the last decade in addition to at least one other incident of sexual misconduct. Five of those officers faced criminal charges and were convicted, in some cases pleading to a lesser offense. Three have ongoing criminal cases. Our reporting highlighted CPD’s internal investigations of two officers: former officer Eric Tabb, who is accused of five instances of sexual misconduct involving other recruits and a probationary officer, and former officer Corey Deanes, who faced allegations from four women who encountered him on the job. 

The Chicago Police Department declined our requests for an interview but said in a statement, that it “takes all allegations of sexual assault seriously, including allegations against CPD members.”

This investigation was built upon our data director trina reynolds-tyler’s groundbreaking Beneath the Surface project, which uses community-driven machine learning to identify patterns of misconduct hidden in police complaint files. trina’s work first identified that police sexual misconduct claims were mislabeled and under-reported, helping prompt this investigation.

We wrote this story to explore the prevalence of sexual assault and sexual misconduct by CPD officers and to examine how the department handles these complaints. This is an underexplored topic and, when it does surface in the news, it's typically the most egregious cases – making it easy to blame a single cop instead of scrutinizing the department’s wider culture. 

Reporting this story was not easy. Reviewing these investigative files was incredibly taxing work because it required reading hundreds of pages describing sexual violence. But this approach was necessary to illustrate the spectrum of sexual misconduct and the impact of not treating these cases seriously.

This reporting would not be possible without previous litigation to allow disciplinary records to be open to the public. Those lawsuits include Bond v. Uterus, Green v. Chicago Police Department and Kalven v. Chicago, which was brought by Jamie Kalven, our founder, and led to the publishing of police misconduct complaints on our Civic Police Data Project site.

This is the first story in a series. We’re continuing to report on this issue. If you or someone you know has experienced sexual assault or misconduct by Chicago Police, we want hear from you. 

Former Chicago Cop Pleads Guilty to Aggravated Battery of Two Female Colleagues

Eric Tabb is one of 14 Chicago officers accused of sexual assault in the past decade with at least one other alleged incident of sexual misconduct. The cases reveal how the department failed to vigorously investigate such allegations involving police.