Chicago’s recent responses to several of our FOIA requests, across a wide range of city departments, show a troubling pattern and suggest a dim future for transparency in Chicago.
Illinois transparency laws have long been weak and rarely enforced by a politically connected judiciary that routinely does whatever it can to protect entrenched power. They know who got them their seat on the bench, and they know who they must protect.
Given this reality, it is hard to believe any response to a FOIA we submit could stand out for how anti-transparency it is. Yet a few of Chicago’s departments decided it was time to stop pretending they give a shit about transparency and go full authoritarian.
Form letters, typos, and same-day denials
We recently wrote about our requests to the Chicago Department of Finance (Office of the Comptroller and its Risk Management Division), the Department of Law, and the Chicago Police Department (a second CPD request). Many of our requests named the exact records and systems we wanted or pointed to published reports that describe them in detail.
One of those reports was written by the City’s own Inspector General. The other, the Matrix Consulting Group staffing study, CPD paid for as part of its obligations under the federal consent decree it has operated under for years. Both reports are public, posted online and widely covered by the media.
None of that mattered. These weren’t just denials. They were sloppy, rushed, and plainly unserious:
- Six minutes, four denials. The Department of Law rejected four separate requests between 2:42 and 2:48 p.m., pasting the same paragraph into every letter, including one that doesn’t even describe the request it answers. It claimed it could not “determine precisely what records are being requested” even though we named the software systems identified by the Inspector General. Read more.
- Copy, paste, typo, repeat. The Comptroller’s office and the Risk Management Division sent identical boilerplate, right down to the same typo (“the identify of any Records”). One letter admits Risk Management sits inside the Comptroller’s office, yet the city split our request in two to inflate its burden claim. It also declared the records “would likely be considered exempt” before looking at a single one. Read more.
- Denied before lunch. CPD denied our request for the data behind the Matrix staffing study in 3 hours and 42 minutes. There was no burden analysis, no cost estimate and no attempt to release anything. Read more.
This is not how a professional public body answers the public. Illinois law requires an agency to offer a requester the chance to narrow a request before denying it as unduly burdensome. What we got instead were form letters telling us to go away. It’s a turn that should scare every Chicagoan.
What they’re hiding matters
Our requests covered topics that matter to anyone who lives or works in Chicago. We sought data and records on CPD staffing, and on how city agencies track, analyze and pay the staggering costs of lawsuit settlements and judgments against CPD.
In 2025 alone, the city racked up a tab of more than $300 million in settlements and judgments. That figure doesn’t include the cost of defending officers in court with in-house and private counsel. The bigger this tab gets, the more important it is that the public can see the data and records behind it.
Where accountability goes to die
These responses leave CJP two options: appeal to the Public Access Counselor (PAC) in the Illinois Attorney General’s Office or sue in Cook County court. Neither inspires confidence.
The Cook County courts treated our last two lawsuits with utter disregard. We are now in the Illinois First District Appellate Court, appealing an appalling ruling in our case against the Illinois Department of Corrections. The judge ruled that because data may exist in an inmate’s file, it is exempt from disclosure, even though the exact same data exists elsewhere in IDOC. The judge went so far as to bar IDOC from being made to check whether the data existed outside the inmate file. We are awaiting a ruling.
Our other previous lawsuit was against the Cook County State’s Attorney’s Office. The judge often showed up unprepared and couldn’t remember what had happened at earlier hearings, including her own rulings and the demands she’d made of the SAO from month to month. A simple case that should have taken months dragged on for years.
The PAC is no better. In our experience, it is impotent. It only makes a difference when it issues a binding opinion that lets it represent the requester in court, and it rarely, if ever, does that. Worse, as we’ve experienced, it can hand down a bizarre ruling that sides with the public body and makes it harder for us to sue.
Once you understand how broken these systems are, you understand why these agencies feel free to take such a drastic turn. They may face no consequences at all.
We’re not backing down
These are not great options, but we aren’t going to accept form letters and same-day denials as the price of asking questions. We have already reached out to secure legal representation, and we’ll keep you updated as we fight for these records.
If you believe Chicagoans deserve to know what their police department costs and how it’s staffed, stand with us.
