Skip to content

By NaBeela Washington

On July 15, 2025, a lightbulb went off at an evening “unveiling.”

I sat in a room full of residents and community organizers while Northwestern University researchers presented Chicago’s heat vulnerability index. Graphs flashed on the screen. Neighborhood-level data. Risk factors mapped to census tracts. The kind of granular information that could direct cooling centers, emergency resources and health interventions to the people who need them most.

The city had commissioned this work. Funded it. Collaborated on it for nearly four years. And sitting there, watching data we couldn’t access, I realized: the city had gotten over on all of us.

They had the data. They showed us what it looked like. They had no intention of releasing it.

That’s when I started thinking about information as a weapon in a story I wrote for Prism. How the absence of data can function like redlining. How gatekeeping what people know about their own vulnerability perpetuates the harm itself.

I spent months trying to prove the city intended to exclude people of color. I documented reporting disparities: From 2019-2023, Illinois reported 3.6 heat-related deaths annually, while New York City reported 525 from 2018-2022. I traced information gatekeeping across the Illinois Department of Public Health (IDPH), Chicago Department of Public Health (CDPH), and the City of Chicago’s Department of Environment (DoE). I filed FOIA after FOIA, watching agencies gaslight me about what data they had.

I could prove delays. I could prove contradictions. I could prove 30 years of pattern.

This is a story about that gap. About what you do when you can see the pattern, but can’t prove the motive. About how to survive accountability journalism when institutions harm people through inaction, gatekeeping and bureaucratic delay, rather than through active wrongdoing you can document.

The Pattern I Could Document

Chicago’s 1995 heat wave killed 739 people, according to The Cook County Medical Examiner’s Office. The Cook County Medical Examiner’s Office initially counted 465, a 37 percent undercount acknowledged in official documents. After 1995, Illinois built a sophisticated heat surveillance structure that included: statewide syndromic systems; emergency department monitoring and vulnerability mapping, down to Census tracts. This shows that the infrastructure exists.

What didn’t change: Exactly how Illinois counts heat deaths. “Deaths, even with the broad heat-related fatality definition used by the Cook County Medical Examiner compared with excess all-cause mortality, were underestimate [sic] (19 vs. 24-25 per 100,000)” (Shen et al., 1998). They knew in 1995. The methodology stayed the same.

Today, Illinois still reports 3.6 heat deaths annually. New York City reports 525.

The FOIA Runaround

I requested emergency department data for heat-related illnesses in high-risk neighborhoods. CDPH claimed it had no existing records fitting my request. They directed me to a data request form instead.

I filed it. An epidemiologist told me CDPH doesn’t track heat-related hospitalizations. She suggested using the Chicago Health Atlas, which showed 3.6 annual deaths from 2019-2023.

But Illinois had published detailed heat surveillance from 2012-2014, tracking 543 ED visits in summer 2014 alone. When I asked the Illinois Department of Public Health (IDPH) for current data, they said they “didn’t track heat mortality regularly even before 2014.”

I had their reports. They did track it. They stopped. Then claimed they never really did.

But what I didn’t have was proof that this was all intentional.

Six Steps When You Can’t Prove Intent

  • Step 1: Establish the baseline. Find the crisis that created urgency. Document what was supposed to change.
  • Step 2: Build the timeline. Track what changed (surveillance investment, academic partnerships) and what didn’t (death certificate methodology, medical examiner protocols).
  • Step 3: Find jurisdictions that solved it. New York City implemented heat mortality surveillance. Their methodology is public, proven and comparable.
  • Step 4: Document capacity gaps. Illinois runs sophisticated real-time surveillance, partners with research universities and publishes epidemiological studies. The capacity exists, but the application is selective.
  • Step 5: Surface official acknowledgments. The most powerful evidence came from IDPH’s own documents admitting undercount.
  • Step 6: Verify present reality. Current numbers: 3.6 versus 525. The gap persists.

When you’re documenting institutional failure, the strongest language stays anchored in evidence rather than motive. Phrases like “failed to implement methodologies used by comparable jurisdictions” or “a systematic gap between surveillance capacity and death attribution” describe what happened without speculating about why. 

By contrast, terms such as “deliberately suppressed,” “intentionally obscured” or “refused to act” require proof of intent that some reporting can’t supply. The distinction matters. Instead of writing, “Chicago deliberately undercounts heat deaths to avoid accountability,” you can present the documented facts: Chicago reports 3.6 annual heat deaths while New York City reports 525, despite having similar technical capacity and acknowledging its own numbers underestimate actual mortality. The latter is defensible, precise and rooted in the record, allowing readers to reach their own conclusions.

What I Learned

I assumed proving harm would be enough. I thought a 30-year pattern eliminated the need to prove intent. I expected official acknowledgment of undercount would function as a smoking gun.

What I learned: some institutional failures are structural, not personal. The absence of clear individual responsibility is itself the story.

The constraints I hadn’t anticipated were: How high the evidentiary bar sits for intent language; and how pattern recognition by a journalist differs from legally defensible claims about motive.

What I’d do differently: I asked too many clarifying questions in FOIAs. I wanted to understand what records existed before requesting them. Agencies used this against me, treating requests as media inquiries rather than records requests.

If I started over, I’d narrow my requests to specific date ranges and exact record types. Don’t ask questions. Don’t explain why you want them. Just request.

The emotional reality: This is the first story where I cried after publication. Not because I was happy. Because I wanted more. Because the people I interviewed deserve more than pattern documentation. They deserve to know why no one, still, has shared the Heat Vulnerability Index and why the surveillance stopped.

Journalism operates within constructs. Legal constructs. Editorial constructs. Evidentiary constructs. Sometimes those constructs limit truth. When you can see the harm, document the pattern, talk to the people living it and still can’t say what you know—that hurts.

What’s Next

I’m hoping to work more deeply with Ayme Robinson, an Englewood resident and educator who appears in my Prism piece. I want to continue building something that moves away from traditional journalism constraints, like the newsroom I started, 15 West. I want to see more community-led projects that don’t wait for agencies to release what they’re gatekeeping. And I want to document lived experience alongside official statistics. 

Pattern documentation reveals what smoking-gun journalism sometimes misses: How institutions acknowledge problems without fixing them. Where oversight gaps exist structurally. Why accountability fails even with transparency.

For journalists investigating institutional failure, the evidentiary bar for intent is high — perhaps necessarily so. The bar for pattern documentation is achievable. Know which story you can prove.  Often, the question isn’t “who made the bad decision?” The question is “why did no one do more?”

Scroll To Top