In part one of our “Taking Cover” series, we summarized the findings of our year-long investigation and profiled three suburban shootings where a Robbins officer shot an innocent 13-year-old boy on his aunt’s doorstep; a SWAT team launched an assault on a man police described as an anti-government survivalist; and an Evanston police officer lost a finger in a police shooting that took the life of a 32-year-old man armed with a switchblade knife.
As we mentioned in our story, many of the cases detailed in the four part series offers “a vivid portrait of a lack of oversight, remediation, or even self-reflection in some of these cash-strapped community police departments, even as they deal with some of the same big-city problems that grab national headlines just down the road in Chicago.”
Over a span of three months, we also collaborated with WBEZ to produce audio segments for each of our stories. Here is the segment we ran with our first story. Coincidentally, it debuted on WBEZ five days after the publication of our series.