Submissions are now open for the 22nd Anniversary Richard H. Driehaus Foundation Aards for Investigative Reporting. News ...

For first-time watchers, Chicago’s City Council can seem incomprehensible. Most of the business is done in a routine, rapid-fire succession of votes and gavel raps, punctuated by repetitions of the ...

Mayor Brandon Johnson released his proposed 2026 budget for the City of Chicago on Thursday, Oct. 16. As in previous years, BGA Policy will release a series of department-specific budget snapshots ...

A BGA Policy analysis of the 16 county detention centers across Illinois has found that only three successfully have completed audits mandated by federal law to enforce protections against sexual ...

Photo of the Illinois State Capitol. In 2023, the Office of Statewide Pretrial Services launched a probation and pretrial electronic monitoring program for 70 of Illinois’ 102 counties. It has since ...

Departmental budgets for three of Chicago’s oversight agencies are not on their own sufficient to meet mandatory minimums described in law, a BGA Policy analysis of annual appropriations and related ...

The Chicago Police Department is the city’s largest department both in headcount and in overall funds appropriated, with nearly three times the positions budgeted as the next-largest Chicago Fire ...

Whoops! There was an error and we couldn't process your subscription. Please reload the page and try again. Budget growth was not matched by staffing growth because ...

In a memo sent Friday to the Chicago City Council’s ethics committee, city Inspector General Deborah Witzburg laid out a series of what her office characterizes as obstructions by the city’s law ...

A yearly Chicago ritual is about to begin. Oct. 16 marks the start of two weeks of budget hearings, when department heads will appear before City Council to take questions about their administrative ...

Under Illinois’ Freedom of Information Act, there is a presumption that government records are open to the public. Body cam footage is an anomaly. Its availability is dictated by the Law Enforcement ...

The proposed 2024 budget for the City of Chicago, Mayor Brandon Johnson’s first, offers relatively modest increases in citywide spending and staffing, with a 1.3% increase in appropriations and a 0.9% ...