Chicago Cops Use Social Media to Track Grieving Families of Gunshot Victims

It was below freezing in Chicago on December 12, 2017 when a 23-year-old man was fatally shot in the abdomen while standing on the sidewalk. In the days following the victim’s death, the Chicago Police Department (CPD) gathered information about the victim on social media. Documents obtained by OneZero indicate that the CPD also went one step further, collecting social media content from individuals who were publicly mourning and grieving for the loss of the 23-year-old man. “I can’t stop crying…” one of the posts collected by the CPD reads, “why would this happen.”

Hundreds of pages of internal documents obtained via FOIA requests by the ACLU of Illinois and the Lucy Parsons Labs, a Chicago-based police transparency and accountability nonprofit, reveals for the first time how the CPD surveils the social media accounts of victims of gun violence, as well as their friends and family members. Though the surveillance is conducted in an effort to gather further information about shootings, police officers also gather public social media content from individuals who apparently have little or nothing to do with the crime. The documents span 12 nonconsecutive months from November 2017 through July 2019.