Transcript for Trina Reynolds-Tyler and Sarah Conway: Going Beyond the Data

A quick warning: this episode includes stories of violence. Please take care while listening.

Recorded in New York City.

Host, Nicole Carroll: This is the Pulitzer on the Road Podcast connecting Pulitzer Prize winners with audiences around the country. I'm your guide, Nicole Carroll. I’m a member of the Pulitzer Prize Board and a faculty member at the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication at Arizona State University.

Each spring, 23 Pulitzer Prizes are awarded for distinguished journalism, books, drama and music. On this podcast, we talk with many of the winners and hear the stories behind their prize-winning work.

On this episode, we’re featuring journalists Trina Reynolds-Tyler –

Trina Reynolds-Tyler: My name is Trina Reynolds-Tyler and I’m the data director at the Invisible Institute.

Nicole Carroll: – And Sarah Conway.

Sarah Conway: My name is Sarah Conway and I’m a senior reporter and special projects manager at City Bureau.

Nicole Carroll: Both the Invisible Institute and City Bureau are small nonprofit news outlets in Chicago, and Sarah and Trina won the 2024 Pulitzer in Local Reporting for a series they teamed up on called Missing in Chicago. 

Here’s a clip of Trina from the series.

Trina Reynolds-Tyler: For this investigation, City Bureau and the Invisible Institute requested the Chicago Police Department’s missing person reports from 2000 to 2021.

Nicole Carroll: To create Missing in Chicago, Trina and Sarah analyzed data and uncovered documents by using the Freedom of Information Act – which is commonly referred to as FOIA.

Trina Reynolds-Tyler: The analysis shows that Black girls between the ages of 10 and 20 make up nearly one-third of all missing person cases in the city, according to police data, despite comprising only 2% of the city population as of 2020.

Nicole Carroll: They also conducted in-depth interviews with more than 40 sources in order to share the stories of the real women behind the statistics they found.

Women like Shantieya Smith.

Here’s Sarah in the series.

Sarah Conway: Shantieya Smith was a proud, protective mother. Every morning, rain or shine, the slender 26 year old would sling her young daughter’s backpack over her shoulder and hand in hand. They would dash across the street to the neighborhood elementary school. Smith was a protector in her North Lawndale home, where three generations lived under one roof. The cousin you'd call when there was trouble, who [taught] anyone the latest Chicago dance styles in the living room and whose cherry red or bottle blond weaves mirrored her bright energy. So when Smith walked out her front door on a warm May afternoon in 2018 to run a quick errand, her mother, Latanya Moore, didn't think much of it. It was a trip that was supposed to be so fast she didn't even bring her cell phone, Moore remembers. Moore didn't realize this would be the last moment she would see her daughter alive. Two weeks later, Smith's body, disposed and desecrated, was found in a nearby abandoned garage. Her case joined the 99.8% of missing persons cases from 2000 to 2021 that Chicago police have categorized as not criminal in nature. Years after Smith's body was found, a killer has still not been charged. If police had taken her case seriously, things might be different, she says.

Nicole Carroll: For years, families and community groups have been trying to get the Chicago Police Department – or CPD – to do more to look for Black girls and women who go missing.

Aware of these efforts, Trina and Sarah wanted to understand why so many Black girls and women disappear in Chicago and why many of them are never found. In recent years, the city of Chicago formed a Missing and Murdered Chicago Women task force, and the CPD announced policy changes.

We caught up with Trina and Sarah while they were in New York for the Pulitzer Prize award ceremony. Salamishah Tillet, who won the 2022 Pulitzer Prize for Commentary, hosted the conversation with them.

Salamishah Tillet: Congratulations. Big deal. Your life just changed a bit – you’re gonna have so much fun tonight.

Nicole Carroll: Salamishah is familiar with Sarah and Trina’s work. She’s the co-founder of A Long Walk Home, an organization that uses art and activism to empower young people and end violence against women and girls.

So, on this episode of Pulitzer on the Road, Trina Reynolds-Tyler and Sarah Conway join Salamishah Tillett to talk about making their series, Missing in Chicago – and how their reporting has helped influence changes within the Chicago Police Department. 

Salamishah Tillet: We're talking today because you won the Pulitzer for Local Reporting for a series you worked on called Missing in Chicago. So, Trina, you're at the Invisible Institute. Sarah, you're at City Bureau. So, how did you two come together on this particular project?

Trina Reynolds-Tyler: Wow… so Sarah and I were navigating the journalism ecosystem – 

Sarah Conway: I remember I knew of Trina from the building – 

Trina Reynolds-Tyler: At the time, City Bureau was in the downstairs and Invisible Institute was upstairs. So I remember when Sarah was holding her baby, and once her baby threw up on my partner at the time. 

Sarah Conway: [laughs] True story.

Trina Reynolds-Tyler: And for a very long time, I've been really interested in the intersection between gender-based violence and policing. And I went to graduate school because I wanted to learn how to use machine learning and various data science tools to more easily access information. I led a project at the Invisible Institute called Beneath the Surface, which essentially built a classifier algorithm of sorts to more easily identify different types, contexts where police misconduct intersected with gender-based violence. Through that project, we identified 54 complaints between the year 2011 and 2015 that were related to how Chicago police were treating people or that were related to the ways that Chicago police were handling and engaging with [the] community around missing persons cases. Once I got those 54 complaints, I reached out to Sarah. We had coffee at Build Coffee, and I think we sat at the ledge by the window, and I basically proposed to Sarah. 

Sarah Conway: Yeah, she did propose, and I was immediately – we didn't know what the investigation was going to be at that time, but Trina was like, we're going to look at police through the lens of gender-based violence, and specifically about missing persons. And what really intrigued me was that City Bureau, our whole ethos is we involve community members in media. We have a documenters program where we train people to document public meetings around the country. I work in our edit department with fellows, so it’s like I'm always doing collaborative media. And I was like, okay, let's go. Because my mom's sister went missing when I was six. 

Salamishah Tillet: Mhmm.

Sarah Conway: And she had struggled with so many, you know, underlying mental health issues. And so when Trina said that, I felt like I was like, oh, this is an opportunity to really merge a lot of things that I really wanted to focus my work on. That I found a lot of personal value to. I was like, you know, people are always talking about missing persons. And I was like, there's no one else that I'd want to do this project with. 

Salamishah Tillet: Mmm. First of all, I just want to thank you for sharing that, Sarah, and then thank you both for doing this really profoundly thoughtful and empathetic investigative reporting. So one of the words that jumped out to me from your reporting was this idea of “missing-ness.” And you describe it both as a symptom and as a cause of several risk factors impacting Black girls and young women. So can you just define what “missing-ness” means?

Trina Reynolds-Tyler: So there are many reasons why someone could become missing. Ultimately that missingness is a symptom piece is – okay, someone is reported missing because something happened and in some cases maybe it’s because they didn't answer their phone. Maybe it's because their parents are paranoid. Right. But many times people are going missing because they're running away from something. So it is a symptom in the sense that something is going on for them to go missing in the first place. But when we think about missing-ness as a cause, we then get to the other side, which is what are they running into? We see the ways that when you are a missing person and you are not accounted for, the ways that you can easily become exploited, especially when there's no one looking for you, when your picture is not posted up, etc. Right. A young person who is experiencing a conflict with their family – Desiree Robinson – right. We know that she ran away, but she ultimately went to a party and this guy wouldn't let her leave. He began sex trafficking her.

Salamishah Tillet: Mhmm.

Trina Reynolds-Tyler: We don't know what she was grappling with as a young person. We do know that she ran away. She didn't want to be there in that moment and she wanted some space. So that's a symptom, right? But then the cause – when going to some space outside of her home – encounters this man who immediately begins to exploit her. And so, you know, there's a two-sided piece here. 

Salamishah Tillet: I think you both know that I co-founded an organization that's based in Chicago called A Long Walk Home. Last year, we had an exhibition called the Black Girlhood Altar that was dedicated to missing and murdered black girls and women. And the whole ethos of our organization is using art to end violence against girls and women and with a specific focus on Black girls and young women. And so it's a very underserved population, but it's also a very underrepresented population in terms of media coverage. And so I'm so curious why you two chose to focus on Black girls and Black women in your research and reporting. Was it because that's who rose to the surface or is that how you went into it? 

Trina Reynolds-Tyler: First off, when you look at the police misconduct complaints that brought us here, [the] majority of those are complaints filed by Black women about their Black children. When we received the missing persons cases from the past two decades. Now the people who are reported missing the most, the cases that are most represented are Black children. But it's interesting, when you break down the sex of the people, of the cases of missing persons, you see that Black males go missing at a much younger age and a much older age. But when you look at Black females, you see that there is a clear spike for Black girls between the ages of 10 and 20. 

Sarah Conway: I remember when you showed me the data visualization it's literally like a spike. It's actually a mountain.

Salamishah Tillet: Mhmm.

Sarah Conway: Like, it goes up astronomical for Black teenage girls. And so why would we not focus on people who are so disproportionately impacted? 

Trina Reynolds-Tyler: The idea wasn't to make invisible Black men and boys. Where Black boys and men and boys are going missing, is going to look distinctly different than the ways that Black women and girls go missing. And we – in order for us to really do a deep dive – it was required that we be specific and make space for a larger conversation around the pipeline while using Black women and girls as a bit of a case study. 

Salamishah Tillet: Mhmm.

Trina Reynolds-Tyler: Yeah. 

Salamishah Tillet: You know, some people can critique you for being too specific. 

Sarah Conway: Yeah. 

Salamishah Tillet: And I bring this up because as, like, a Black feminist scholar and critic and activist, I also firmly believe that, like an intersectional approach, like looking at race and gender and class and geographical bias at the same time is the actual most effective way of understanding root causes. But also, I think this approach gets us to like the widest umbrella and cast the biggest net to approaching oppression and then leading to change. So I wanted to know, is there a lens that you use to read the data differently? Is there a lens you're using to hear these stories differently?

Trina Reynolds-Tyler: A lot of times, people, they say you're just looking at Black women and girls. You are excluding a lot of other people who are also impacted by the issue. But if we're looking at a system and Black women and girls are the people who are primarily impacted by it, it is imperative that we study their cases because we are then widening our understanding of what is possible to occur. Even when a white girl goes missing, she's going through that same system of a missing persons pipeline. And you can learn a lot, especially when you're comparing, well, this person is treated this way. This person is treated this way. But I'm not interested in just saying treat Black girls better based on how you treated this white girl. I'm interested in what is happening here? What are the risks of exploitation that occur when the most vulnerable population goes missing? Because then we are able to account for that white girl's experience and everyone else's experiences. We're making space for the narratives and experiences of all the other people who come through this pipeline. 

Salamishah Tillet: So while you're doing this reporting, what were some of the big questions you wanted answers to and what were some of the goals that you went into the project with? 

Sarah Conway: Well, you know, it's really interesting. We talked to many families and ultimately some of the findings came from, I would say, people sharing the oral histories of their experiences and who their loved ones were. We started picking up on patterns just from talking to many families about how the Chicago police are telling people to wait 24 to 40 hours.

Trina Reynolds-Tyler: But the law says there is no wait time to report a person as missing. 

Sarah Conway: They're telling Black mothers when their younger daughters, let's say, who are teens, are in their early 20s, that they probably ran away with a boy. And they're refusing to actually take missing persons reports. It was through conversations with families that we started picking up on patterns of this is happening to people over and over again and the similarities are that they're Black families and they're often on the South Side of the city or the West Side of the city, and that they have a young woman or just an adult Black woman in general, or a a literal child who is missing. And they're saying the same things and they're treating families the same way. The last time they've had a hearing was actually in 2017. And they had said that they equally and fairly investigate all these cases and that, you know, most people return home. 

Trina Reynolds-Tyler: Right. CPD spoke to the City Council safety committee and said 99.9% of juveniles who were reported missing between 2000 and 2016 were located or returned. And this is an important note, because in our reporting, we identified two juveniles between that same time period where Chicago police had closed the case before the missing have been found. And these two cases were of Black teenage girls who were later found murdered. And we heard narratives from Chicago police that said we investigate these cases equally across race, zip code, etc. Okay. What can we learn from the data that affirms what Chicago police is saying? Is what we see in the data affirming it? Or actually, is their data incomplete? You know, we ultimately found they – they're not even collecting information to evaluate how they're handling these cases for them to even make the statement. So we were – we had questions. What is driving these cases? Why is it happening to Black girls between the ages of 10 and 20 specifically? Those are some of the questions we had before. And then by way of talking to families, we could see they were saying the same things over and over again.

Salamishah Tillet: And you went through a lot of data, including more than 1 million police records.Right? So that's enormous. One stat that is still shocking to me is the idea that missing Black girls and women between the ages of 10 and 20 make up about 30% of Chicago’s police missing persons cases, and yet they constitute only 2% of the population. Right. So that's like mind blowing. And often as reporters, you build on work contributed by others in journalism and history, sociology and adjacent fields. So can you kind of help us understand how you approached that data? Like, walk us through that process of obtaining it and then we can talk a little bit more about translating that and sharing that in your process there, too. 

Trina Reynolds-Tyler: So I went to graduate school at the University of Chicago Harris School of Public Policy. In 2019, I interned at the Human Rights Data Analysis Group, a crew of human rights statisticians, data scientists. And that's where I really got my data science training. While I was there. You know, I was told to bring a project, so I had a PDF of all open missing persons cases. So I started like ongoing FOIA-ing for all missing persons cases reported by Chicago police from 2000 to present. So, you know, once you get that information you want to analyze it, you want to think, okay, what columns, what information is Chicago police collecting? They're collecting last seen, last seen date, last seen address, but also officer arrival time. And the moment that the officer who arrived sent that information to the missing persons section and the moment that case went from the missing person section to the detectives all the way to the close date. And so you're able to see, like, the lifespan of a case based off of the data collected from that missing persons report. And so when thinking about, like, the approach to the data, there's like only so much information that each data set will give you access to. And then we depended on the news that was reported previously in order to add even more context. We're looking at the pipeline of a human life in some cases.

Sarah Conway: That's such a good way to put it, Trina. You can follow someone through different government records. And so we were always peeling back the thread of how far can we go. We were an absolute menace to local government in that, you know, government lives in silos, right? And so some of the cases that we identified, there were actually homicides that were hidden in missing persons. You know, that’s closed non-criminal, we went to the actual narratives in autopsy reports. Do they exist in Cook County Sheriff data? Are they in medical examiner data? What is the narrative, say in their autopsy? What do their family members say? What did it say in news reports? What does it look like in missing persons data? You know, when we look at the investigative documents, what do those say? So we were cross-referencing a lot of things and never really depending on one data source or, you know, a singular document, because our suspicions were always that based on what families had been saying, that they had not received adequate investigative services or they had had their cases delayed or denied. And so we really just wanted to see, like, what does this person look like in data and records? And then pairing that with talking to families and people who actually knew them because there's only so much you can know about a person in records, you know, there were so many things that don't exist in records. All that stuff actually matters because all these things are really deeply connected. 

Trina Reynolds-Tyler: Many people could have and have actually looked at the missing persons data and taken it at face value and only investigated and reported on. Okay, well, these many are open and the ones that remain open are disproportionately Black girls. But, you know, we took a step further and we attempted to validate that data. And so it's really a lesson to never trust the data at face value. Always assume that when you receive a data set, it is missing something and doing the best that you can to identify the things that it's missing. Like if the data is saying this is not a problem, but the people are saying this is definitely a problem. Something is awry. And as people who are working with data, it is our duty, our responsibility to dig deeper.

Salamishah Tillet: It also seems that you're showing how the power of narrative can humanize the data, right? So the idea of this being a life span of an individual, but then through your investigative reporting process, you really brought these people alive to us as listeners or as readers. And so can you just explain a bit how you approached making this data human in a way that we can then recognize the humanity of the women and girls who have gone missing? 

Sarah Conway: I would say the narrative of the story follows Shantieya Smith, who was a young mother who went missing on the West Side of Chicago in North Lawndale. She had a very young daughter. You know, her mother was like, and everyone we talked to, we talked to neighbors on her block. She loved her daughter. She was a great mother. And her daughter was really at the center of her life. So we found in deeply looking at records connected to Shantieya and data that things weren't really matching up with what her mother said had happened. For instance, when Shantieya walked out the door to go on, like, a quick errand and never came back. We know that her mother waited some time thinking, you know, it's a holiday weekend and she went in to report her daughter missing and was ultimately told that like, “No, she ran away with the boy. She's going to come back.” And talking to Latanya Moore, she was able to really walk us through the entire process of what had happened, when Shantieya walked out the door to when Shantieya was found in an abandoned garage on the West Side of the city, like a couple houses down from where they live. And so we really structured the story – it involves many family stories – but the narrative I would say, of the piece really follows Shantieya Smith because when we looked at different family stories, we found that Latanya had experienced a lot of them. Police tried to deny her missing persons report and a detective did not show up in a quick manner to start the investigation. Latanya felt that while her daughter was missing, that they weren't actually looking for her. She had to gather neighbors and they had actually even gone to an abandoned building where 15-year-old Sadaria Davis she had been found. Sadaria was also – had been missing in the same neighborhood on the West Side of the city. They had gone with bats because they were, like, maybe Shantieya’s being held in this building. And, you know, and then ultimately her daughter was found very close to her house and she was like, if police had actually been really looking for her, took this case seriously, why did this happen? And she still doesn't have a lot of answers. We wanted people to understand that this isn't just someone goes missing and then it ends. There's so much to a person. And these were people who were deeply loved by their family and friends and [oftentimes] there are public health issues that are connected to these cases. The eviction crisis in Chicago, underlying mental health disorders, substance use disorder, postpartum depression, children who are experiencing neglect, they're oftentimes not getting their needs met.

Trina Reynolds-Tyler: When we're talking about using data to humanize people, I am so hopeful that we can lean in to what it means to use data to make information and people more accessible to bring us together. And so I'm so thrilled that we were able to identify the ways that technology can parse through hundreds of thousands of documents. How looking at multiple data sets and talking to people can help to actually validate, right. To confirm that a thing has occurred to build a larger picture instead of doing this thing where we just swoop people all together. Homicide, homicide, homicide. It's like, no, a homicide is not just a homicide. Sometimes it's a conflict, sometimes it's intimate partner violence. You know, when we can use data to go deep so that we can see larger patterns, that's when we are doing the human work. But when we use data in order to lump and stereotype, we won't find ourselves in a future that is bright.

Salamishah Tillet: So, we're talking in October 2024. How has your reporting had an impact on this issue? What are some of the recent developments? 

Sarah Conway: The Chicago Inspector General's office included in their 2024 list of priorities, like their A1 priority was to investigate and look into the Chicago Police Department's missing persons pipeline, like how they're handling data in cases and investigative practices. In the spring, there was an ordinance that was introduced in [the] Chicago City Council to create a task force in the city of Chicago to look into missing and murdered Black women and girls. It referenced our reporting and the reporting of Dorothy Tucker, who's a local investigative reporter who analyzed crime data to see that Black women make up a disproportionate percentage of crime victims in the city. And there was a City Council committee on public safety hearing, and we testified as well as others about this issue, what it looks like, you know, stories from impacted people. We had Coco in the room, the head of Move, Good Kids, Mad City. A lot of – you know, Ernestine Daughters – really like the community groups that have been doing a lot of organizing and work. They were there and the Chicago Police Department was also present. So it was at the hearing that we found out, you know, almost one year later, some of the impact of the reporting. Specific to changes that they have either made or going to make within the Chicago Police Department. They are changing some of their data-keeping practices around, you know, the information they're going to include an updated directive around case closure, specifically about how they are reclassifying cases, which was, I would say, one of the most major parts of our investigations. And they're going to incorporate a mandatory digital screening for missing people who return to understand were they victims of a crime? What happened, what resources do they need so they can actually improve the data that exist. And they're going to also hire an investigative data analyst. And, you know, they had said that they are going to create a guide for detectives on best practices and standards around investigations for missing persons cases. 

Trina Reynolds-Tyler: It was as if our testimony not only impacted the way that the Chicago Police Department is collecting their data, is doing their screenings in order to get folks to services that they need, but also equip the alderpeople with asking deeper questions. Had they asked those deeper questions in 2017, they would have been able to come to those conclusions. But it took our reporting to push them, to equip them with information so that they could be rigorous in their questioning of, you know, the services that are primarily responsible for responding to missing persons cases. 

Salamishah Tillet: Well, the impact that you all have had and are continuing to have, kind of brings up, you know the power of, like, the single story, right? And then you are brought together so many single stories and so much data to create a larger narrative that has activated politicians, police departments, and in service of community members whose families and daughters and sisters and mothers who have gone missing. So I want to ask you as journalists, this idea that activism and journalism are supposed to live in completely different worlds, and is there a tension between these ideas? How do you see your work fitting into that conversation about objectivity and maybe justice? 

Sarah Conway: I don't really consider myself a traditional journalist – I didn't do the “I moved to Nebraska to a town of 2000 people to do daily reporting. And then I went to The New York Times.” I have always worked in community media, in nonprofit news. 

Salamishah Tillet: Mhmm.

Sarah Conway: And so my personal values and the values of the organization I work at and the Invisible Institute where Trina works, like, we deeply care about our connection to and our accountability to communities and the narratives that we put out in our stories, the type of resources and information we can give people so they can make better decisions and steward their own lives. I don't see my work as a form of activism, but I also – that's why I am doing this work. Like, that's what I think is at the heart of public service and journalism. You know, I think about a lot of the mothers and just family members of people who are in our stories, who – one mother in particular – she had stopped talking to media. In fact, she had really kind of tried to stop talking about what had happened. And through building a relationship with her and our reporting, like we literally walked into a room and she was standing in front of, like, five or six TV news cameras talking about her daughter. She came up to us and was like, “You all helped me find healing.” And that's why we do this work is because individuals can actually find healing through narrative justice. And maybe some people would consider that a form of activism. But why are we doing journalism if we're not creating pathways for impacted people to find healing or to see their community story or their individual story actually reflected in media? And so I think we've been given a lot of privilege really to be able to work at organizations that value that. 

Trina Reynolds-Tyler: Yeah, I am definitely not an activist journalist. You know, it's interesting. I'm really in the data science – data journalist. So I [see] myself as a scientist than an activist, humbly. And that’s because I am really interested in identifying and interrogating systems. And at the Invisible Institute, we investigate policing and make information accessible, build tools to equip people to hold their government institutions more accountable. And I say policing because that's primarily the institution that we've interrogated but is not exclusive to policing. We are being expansive. Then we're able to really do rigorous journalism. Any investigative piece that I'm doing just note it’s scientific, and I'm not coming with, oh, I think or I believe. I'm coming with, I heard this story. I pulled the records. I looked at the data, and I found more people who also confirm that this thing is real.

Sarah Conway: We're not organizing marches. We're not doing these things. But what we can do is interrogate the data and records and really look at things, and I think that's the value that we provided on this issue, is that we did deeply look at something that we can use the tools of journalism to really assess whether police are telling the truth or not. 

Salamishah Tillet: Mhmm.

Sarah Conway: And that question always comes up for journalists who are interrogating systems of power. It's always when you are doing investigative reporting that actually centers and is focusing on communities, that then it becomes an issue of you're doing activism journalism, but I think that we're using the tools and the rigor and the integrity of journalism as journalists to really deeply look at in a holistic way, an issue. And that's what we wanted to do from the beginning. 

Trina Reynolds-Tyler: The activists did the work. The activist is activated. they was in the streets marching on a regular basis. We didn't come and say, like, get active, y'all. We had a reporting question and we pulled on all the threads. We talked to all the people and we were scared, right, because this stuff is heavy and this stuff is dark. If we were to pretend and act like what we were reporting on didn't impact us, we would not have put out such a rigorous and thorough investigation. At the end of the day, it wasn't like burn down the Chicago Police. It was, like, if Chicago Police are the people who are responding to this issue and we're talking to Chicago Police and they're saying this thing, then these are the ways that they can improve, the way that they're interfacing with most impacted and vulnerable communities so that people can better understand what is driving the issue. Truly, I see myself as a scientist, you know, as a data journalist, but I'm using data science as a medium. I'm not just pulling data when it suits me. I'm looking at the data because I'm nosy, you know? And so, I think is really important to note that we are thinking constantly about methodology, which means I'm putting it all on the table, and I'm skeptical of it all, and I'm doing it in a trauma-informed way because if I don't, I might accidentally leave out a narrative that is integral in better understanding what is happening here. 

Salamishah Tillet: One of the powerful parts of your reporting was to highlight the ways in which families and communities, in lieu of the law protecting them or in lieu of police officers doing their job, created their own systems and networks and safety nets for each other. This idea of these communities and these families and these people holding the city accountable and also holding the memories of their loved ones with such care and beauty and grace comes through in your reporting as well. 

Sarah Conway: In every family that we talked to, they went out in search for this person. These people are valuable. They are loved, they are missed, they are wanted. These are not throwaway people and that's what they have been treated like. That's also what the narrative of them is. I don't think when people necessarily see a missing Black girl aged 13, they're thinking, oh all her friends and her aunts and her neighbors are actually looking for her, which is what came up when we talked to families. Families are actually looking for these people and using their own resources to do so, to create their own fliers, to go and drive around and look for people, for people to take off time from their work, to go and look for loved ones. Like that's the reality of what is happening. And I want to say one of the groups that we mentioned in a resource list, Black and Missing Foundation, has been an incredible resource for families. We also know that based on what has happened nationally in other parts of the country, that there have been programs that have been created to provide resources for families so they don't have to eat $1,000, you know, [the] airplane ticket that they had to buy to go fly somewhere else to look for their daughter. So that was really important to say, because [that's the] reality of what's happening. Police are the entity that people are forced to turn to because there's no other alternative and they're not really happy with the services they're getting. And in our reporting, they have told us that they want more support to do that. They want investment in neighborhood searches. They want investments in safe houses for teenage girls. They want the city of Chicago to invest in an office so that when a Black mother goes into a station to report her child missing, there's an alternative besides, you know, a white shirt that says, no, you know, you have to wait.

Trina Reynolds-Tyler: I mean, and also, like we were collecting data in real time just by way of talking to people. Those things that we reported on, although they are not formally collected in data, they are data. Through our interviews with people identifying the things that people were saying over and over again, the ways that they found each other, like the ways that they leaned on each other. There was some point where some of our sources came together for brunch we had at the City Bureau office, and it was, like, they were all saying the same things related to – from the point where it was like, “When I called the Chicago Police, they would say, ‘He's not in office, he's on vacation, he's on furlough.’” Like, it was like there was that kind of tactics, etc.. Again, data, we can see nearly everyone in the room was saying this as it related to when they called Chicago Police all the way down to like, “Well, I had, you know, this search party,” etc. But then even like at the end of that event, there was like a – just a glimpse into data that I hadn't even considered before, which was like one woman asking another. “How has this impacted your dating life?” I said, Wow, that is so interesting. Like the ways that survivors know and understand the ways that they are impacted by this, and the ways that other people are impacted by it. It is a form of data. If we were to pull together families of missing persons in the ways that they were impacted by the loss of their loved ones or any other topic or issue area, I believe we would find ourselves in a place where we're able to collect information that will help us to understand more ways to move forward. Because if we don't collect and report on the fact that families are organizing their own search parties, that, you know – these other – these various models for getting activated exist, then like that data point. Right. That pattern of human behavior ultimately just disappears into the wind. 

Sarah Conway: And one of the things that comes up listening to Trina, we heard from families about the children who were little when their aunt went missing. The way that that trauma and that loss changes them. 

Salamishah Tillet: Yeah. 

Sarah Conway: They were like, it has changed my niece. It's changed my nephew. It's changed my son. And that's not something that's really being collected, you know. 

Trina Reynolds-Tyler: And that's that trauma, PTSD piece that is through and through connected to the ways that crime and exploitation continues to thrive in some parts of the city of Chicago. It is these things that are the fallout of the neglect and mishandling of people over time and that that spill over into the generations that come afterwards. So we have to find more ways of collecting these kinds of things and not only collecting the pain and trauma of it all, but also collecting the joy that we saw in the process to the joy of feeling people having that support around them from their communities in real time. 

Sarah Conway: And I just want to say that joy is like I think one thing we tried to be very intentional about was the love. Like I think about Bridget Rouse, Sonya Rouse's sister, talking about her and her sister hitting the clubs in the 90s and dancing and how –

Trina Reynolds-Tyler: Yes.

Sarah Conway: [They] had on their outfits. I think about Takaylah Tribbit’s group of best friends who just celebrated her 18th birthday.

Trina Reynolds-Tyler: Or Tammy Pittman talking about Shante Bohanan in the kitchen talking about,  “Look ma, I gotta booty too [laughter].” Right? Like, I resonate with that because I'm – me and my mom, you know what I'm saying? Like the way that families connect and also the things that we totally don't anticipate, right? That stuff is important because, again, it deepens our connection regardless of your race or your sexuality or what is. It’s just deepening the connection because we all love someone so deep and we all make jokes in the kitchen. And I want to find ways that we collect data on joy because that's what keeps those memories alive. 

Salamishah Tillet: Well, speaking of joy, you won a Pulitzer. Where were you all when you found out you won and how did you find out?  

Sarah Conway: Serendipitously, we were in that building that we started talking about at the beginning of this.

Salamishah Tillet: Aww.

Sarah Conway: We were in Invisible Institute's office. Invisible Institute won two Pulitzers. Shout out to the audio team. 

Trina Reynolds-Tyler: [blowhorn sound]

Sarah Conway: So, we were all together and that's where we found out. And it was so joyous.  

Salamishah Tillet: Did you cry? I cried. I I was bawling.

Trina Reynolds-Tyler: I was bawling. Actually a bird pooped on my head when i was on my way to the office that day and i put it on my on my story I’m like a bird just pooped on me and everyone was like –

Sarah Conway: It’s good luck.

Trina Reynolds-Tyler: That’s good luck! Okay, we gonna see. And we yeah, we definitely – we cried. It was ugly cry. My parents, they don’t even know how to pronounce Pulitzer. They don't even know what it was I had to write on a piece of paper. I had to send it to them. Now my dad just Googles it. He don't even say it. My mama just say, “She won a big award.”

Salamishah Tillet: Aww. Thank you.  

Trina Reynolds-Tyler/Sarah Conway: Thank you! 

Nicole Carroll: That’s it for this episode of Pulitzer on the Road. 

Thank you to Trina Reynolds-Tyler and Sarah Conway, the 2024 Pulitzer Prize Local Reporting winners. And thank you to the Pulitzer-winning writer and co-founder of A Long Walk Home, Salamishah Tillet. 

For more details about this work and the work of all Pulitzer winners, please visit our website at www.pulitzer.org. 

Please subscribe and rate the show wherever you get your podcasts. 

Pulitzer on the Road is a production of the Pulitzer Prize Board and is produced by Audacy’s Pineapple Street Studios. 

This show is hosted by me, Nicole Carroll. 

Our senior producer is Justine Daum. 

Natalie Peart is our associate producer. 

Our executive editor is Joel Lovell. 

The head of sound & engineering at Pineapple Street is Raj Makhija. 

This episode was mixed by Marina Paiz, with additional audio engineering by Pedro Alvira. Music licensing by APM. 

Editing, promotion and other support by Pamela Casey, Edward Kliment and Sean Murphy. 

Bari Finkel and Marjorie Miller are our executive producers.