BRONZEVILLE — A new seven-part series by two Chicago journalists takes a closer look at the cases of missing Black women in the city.
“Who Goes Missing In Chicago,” an investigative collaboration from City Bureau and the Invisible Institute, is a sobering assessment of how missing persons cases are handled through the lens of race and class and what solutions are being sought on the local and state levels.
Reporters Sarah Conway and Trina Reynolds-Tyler spent two years talking with grieving families, law enforcement veterans and elected officials while combing through years of Chicago Police Department data.
What they found were overextended detectives and institutions that aren’t quite ready to grapple with the racism and sexism hampering efforts to reunite the missing with their loved ones, or give those loved ones long-awaited closure.
Latonya Moore is still waiting for the DNA evidence she requested from CPD when the body of her daughter, 25-year-old Shantieya Smith, was found in a Lawndale garage in 2018.
The family of Shante Bohanan is still waiting to hear from detectives, too. Bohanan, a 20-year-old Taco Bell employee from the West Side, disappeared after her shift in 2016. Her body was found in a garage days after she went missing.
The medical examiner ruled her cause of death “undetermined,” but Bohanan’s sister and mother recall detectives telling them it was a “clear-cut homicide case,” said Conway.
“It’s like this broad reflection of there needing to be more attention, more oversight within CPD and there needing to be more care with missing persons cases. And for it to a political priority in Chicago,” said Conway. “Families also pointed out the need for them to be able to connect with one another, to access resources, or just know how to navigate the process.”
Conway and Reynolds-Tyler told Block Club that while everyone agrees that more should be done, it’s a matter of truly holding law enforcement agencies and elected officials accountable. Their findings also illustrate a need to rethink how these cases are usually connected to other crimes, said Reynolds-Tyler.
The state’s newly formed task force created to address the violence Black women and girls face convened for the first time in May. While the group has acknowledged that the crisis is “deeply connected” to sex trafficking, there’s still an inability or unwillingness to connect the dots. These cases tend to be connected to intimate partner violence as well, the reporters said.
Things seemed promising when former Mayor Lori Lightfoot launched a multi-million dollar initiative to combat sex trafficking in 2021, but it’s unclear what came of the plan. Despite multiple interview requests to Lightfoot staffers, neither Conway nor Reynolds-Tyler were able to find people willing to talk. Requests for documents were also ignored, they said.
“We FOIA’d a lot of stuff and I don’t think we got anything back. They were like ‘The records you’re asking for don’t exist,'” recalled Conway.
“When you look at sex trafficking data that the CPD has generated — because they are, again, the agency who is apparently reporting these things — it’s like sex trafficking does not happen in the city of Chicago. We specifically asked for human trafficking data and it appears as if there is no human trafficking happening, even though we know Chicago is a hotspot for child prostitution,” said Reynolds-Tyler.
Reynolds-Tyler pointed to the Intergovernmental Missing Child Recovery Act of 1984, which requires any information related to sex crime cases be submitted to a central data repository to help generate profiles of sex offenders and victims, making it easier for law enforcement agencies to act. Though it is known that missing persons are often victims of sex crimes, the latter is massively underreported, Reynolds-Tyler said.
One way to fix that is to make it easier for victims to come forward, she said.
“Survivors of human trafficking are afraid to tell police that they have been trafficked because they’re afraid that if they tell police, the officer will put them in handcuffs. They’re not going to report that. We’re actually facing mass underreporting of crimes from criminalized populations because of those fears,” said Reynolds-Tyler. “Yes, let’s give money to organizations in order to increase their capacity to support survivors. But ultimately the cycle of abuse will continue to be perpetrated when we have this huge disconnect.”
It’s also a matter of how these cases are initially filed. Chicago police are still using paper-based forms that have to entered into their system by hand, which also affects how quickly detectives get assigned to a case, said Conway.
The reporters believe the task force could be even more effective with an active representative from the Chicago Police Department, which would foster a more collaborative approach. Conway noted Montana’s Missing and Murdered Indigenous Persons Task Force as one example where police are actively involved.
“If we’re studying why Chicago women go missing and are murdered at such high rates, there should at least be someone from CPD in the room. When we presented our report, there was no CPD representation. The only law enforcement rep was unable to come. The presence of law enforcement is, for the most part, minimal,” said Conway.
Conway and Reynolds-Tyler hope that those who have experienced the loss of a loved one will come away from their series realizing they aren’t alone, and that they can find some comfort. They also want readers to see that these women were more than just data points; they were women who were deeply loved.
“All Trina and I want is for people to really see the reporting and read it, and for CPD to not avoid responsibility on this,” said Conway.
Check out the full investigation here.
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