Jamie Kalven

James Ewan Kalven (born 1948) is an American journalist, author, human rights activist, and community organizer based in Chicago, Illinois. He is the founder of the Invisible Institute, a non-profit journalism organization based in Chicago's South Side. His work in the city has included reporting on police misconduct and poor conditions of public housing. Kalven has been referred to as a "guerrilla journalist" by Chicago journalist Studs Terkel. grew up in the city's Kenwood neighborhood and is a lifelong resident of its South Side. growing up in a secular Jewish family. His father was Harry Kalven Jr., an alumnus of and law professor at the University of Chicago Law School, and his mother was Betty Kalven (; died 2011). Jamie attended high school at the University of Chicago Laboratory Schools, graduating in 1965. Jamie once traveled from Paris to New Delhi by motorcycle. He was an avid mountaineer, having climbed mountains in the Western U.S., Yukon, Europe, and the Himalayas. During the Indo-Pakistani War of 1971, he interrupted his trip to the Himalayas to visit Bangladesh, which led him to give up mountaineering to become a journalist. By his mid-20s, Kalven intended to pursue a career as a foreign correspondent focused on Asia.

His father, Harry, died in 1974 at the age of 60, leaving behind an unfinished manuscript on legal theories underlying freedom of speech. At the time, Jamie was living in San Francisco with his future wife, photographer Patricia Evans, whom he married in 1977. The attack prompted Kalven to investigate the drivers of violence, poverty, and racial divisions in America; Evans is white, and her assailant was black. Kalven thus wrote a memoir, Working with Available Light: A Family's World After Violence. Nonetheless, Rape Victim Advocates (RVA), a Chicago-based advocacy and counseling organization, praised Kalven for sharing the perspective of a partner of a victim, uncommon in works about sexual violence. In 2005, he was honored by RVA for his work supporting sexual assault survivors and violence prevention. Chicago journalist Studs Terkel, a friend of Kalven and his late father Harry, presented the award. A loose association of collaborators working on race and poverty issues in Chicago would eventually help expand the team even further. This included civil rights attorneys and law students at the Mandel Legal Aid Clinic, a legal clinic at the University of Chicago Law School. The officers also forced Bond's son to attack another man in the building. In June 2005, an attorney for the city issued a subpoena for Kalven's records from his reporting at Stateway, but he resisted the subpoena, citing the reporter's privilege. Kalven was represented by Thomas P. Sullivan, a former U.S. Attorney and partner at Jenner & Block. A magistrate judge rejected the subpoena as overly broad and placing an undue burden upon Kalven.

Following the footnote in the Bond opinion, Kalven and Futterman initiated the FOIA process with the city.

The Illinois Appellate Court rejected the city's arguments in March 2014, in the case Kalven v. City of Chicago. The court held that the complaint register files were not "related to" adjudication proceedings, even though such complaints may eventually lead to disciplinary action. Any preliminary recommendations could be redacted, but the files could not be withheld in their entirety. As for the repeater lists, the court acknowledged the city's contentions that the police department did not ordinarily create such lists during the course of its business, but rather prepared them solely for discovery purposes in the Bond case. However, the repeater lists are still considered to be public records under FOIA, and they merely summarized the complaint register files, so the lists are subject to disclosure for the same reasons. The case became a landmark decision, holding that police misconduct records are public information. The Appellate Court later ruled that the agreement's requirement to destroy records was unenforceable, as it would cause the city to violate FOIA.

Eventually, the Institute became a hub for Chicago police misconduct data, and by 2022 the data project included 247,161 allegations. The data project, ranging from 1988 to 2018, houses complaints and allegations made against officers, the number of sustained complaints, and individual officer profiles that list officer salaries and discipline they received for use-of-force incidents. In the same month, attorneys for McDonald's family had received a copy of the video by filing a subpoena, and demanded $16 million in compensation from the city. By March, McDonald's family and the city approved a $5 million settlement agreement, which also required that the video be kept confidential until the investigation was completed. The video was not released to the public until November 26, 2015, thirteen months after McDonald's murder. and the Ridenhour Courage Prize in March 2016.

In 2017, Kalven was subpoenaed to testify about his sources at a hearing for the murder case against Van Dyke. Cook County Judge Vincent Gaughan quashed the subpoena, finding that Van Dyke's attorneys were engaged in a "fishing expedition" and did not demonstrate that Kalven's testimony would be relevant to their case. Gaughan's decision relied less on the reporter's privilege, but recognized that journalists could not be forced to reveal their sources absent "extraordinary circumstances". In 2018, Kalven was again subpoenaed to testify at a trial of three other police officers involved in the incident, but that subpoena was withdrawn.

Later career alt=Jamie Kalven sitting at an outdoor patioKalven was a visiting practitioner-in-residence at the Kenan Institute for Ethics at Duke University in 2017. He co-produced 16 Shots, an Emmy-winning documentary on the McDonald case. He also worked as a consultant on the TV series 61st Street. In 2021, the Institute won a Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting for its investigation into abusive biting by police dogs, and its podcast Somebody was also a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Audio Reporting.

Kalven stepped down as director of the Institute in 2021. In April 2022, Kalven was recognized for his human rights reporting when he was awarded the I. F. Stone Medal for Journalistic Independence.

Works

– Reporting on the incidents that led to the Bond v. Utreras litigation.

16 Shots'' (2019), co-producer Somebody (2020), executive producer – with the Invisible Institute