Freedom of the Press Foundation is announcing a new crowd-sourced fundraising campaign called the Transparency for Police Fund, which "will fund local journalists around the United States to file Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) and other transparency lawsuits aimed at uncovering police misconduct and video evidence of brutality against unarmed men and women."

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A major scandal is currently engulfing the Chicago Police Department and the city's mayor, Rahm Emanuel. It was all triggered by disclosure of a horrific video showing what appears to be the cold-blooded murder by a police officer of 17-year-old African-American Laquan McDonald, who was shot 16 times. That video shocked the nation and led to the arrest of the police officer as well as a Justice Department investigation of the department.

For more than a year, the city fought to suppress that video, ensuring Emanuel's re-election could proceed without knowledge of what happened. A New York Times op-ed by former University of Chicago law professor Bernard Harcourt explicitly accused Emanuel and the city of deliberately covering up the video to help the mayor's re-election campaign, arguing that "the video of a police shooting like this in Chicago could have buried Mr. Emanuel's chances for re-election." Harcourt added, "These actions have impeded the criminal justice system and, in the process, Chicago's leaders allowed a first-degree murder suspect, now incarcerated pending bail, to remain free for over a year on the city's payroll."

That this video is now public is largely due to the heroic, relentless work of a young independent journalist in Chicago, Brandon Smith. Numerous large media outlets filed requests for that video under the state's FOIA laws, and simply took "no" for an answer when the city claimed its release would jeopardize an ongoing investigation. Smith, however, regarded the city's claims with skepticism rather than blind reverence, retained his own lawyers, and sued the city in court. He won, and a Chicago judge ordered release of the video.

And now, as my colleague Juan Thompson reported yesterday, the resulting transparency is shining light on other police killings in the city. As he wrote, "The Chicago Police Department has an extensive and troubling legacy of violence. Over the last five years, Chicago officers have fatally shot 70 people, more than any other big-city police department in the U.S."

In late 2012, the Freedom of the Press Foundation was created by Daniel Ellsberg, The Intercept's co-founder Laura Poitras, John Cusack, Xeni Jardin, various EFF officials such as J.P. Barlow, and myself (along with those founders, the board now includes Intercept technologist Micah Lee and Edward Snowden). As I wrote when we announced its formation, the primary objective, beyond the original project of destroying the extra-judicial financial blockade of WikiLeaks, was "to ensure that truly independent journalistic outlets -- devoted to holding the U.S. government and other powerful factions accountable with transparency and real adversarial journalism -- are supported to the fullest extent possible."

Brandon Smith is exactly the type of independent journalist we had in mind when we formulated that mission. As he recounts in the discussion I had with him (transcript below), he has struggled significantly since leaving his job years ago as a reporter for a local paper in Ohio in order to work independently, yet he just broke one of the biggest and most important police brutality stories of the decade through intrepid determination and an adversarial posture to those in power. Funding will enable him to continue not only the substantial work left to be done on the Laquan McDonald case, which he details here, but a wide range of other investigative projects he is pursuing.

Today, Freedom of the Press Foundation is announcing a new crowd-sourced fundraising campaign called the Transparency for Police Fund, which "will fund local journalists around the United States to file Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) and other transparency lawsuits aimed at uncovering police misconduct and video evidence of brutality against unarmed men and women." The first two recipients are Smith as well as Invisible Institute, a journalism and transparency group in the South Side of Chicago that was also instrumental in forcing release of the McDonald tape.

Go to The Intercept to read the rest of this article.

Authors Bio:

[Subscribe to Glenn Greenwald] Glenn Greenwald is a journalist,former constitutional lawyer, and author of four New York Times bestselling books on politics and law. His most recent book, "No Place to Hide," is about the U.S. surveillance state and his experiences reporting on the Snowden documents around the world. His forthcoming book, to be published in April, 2021, is about Brazilian history and current politics, with a focus on his experience in reporting a series of expose's in 2019 and 2020 which exposed high-level corruption by powerful officials in the government of President Jair Bolsonaro, which subsequently attempted to prosecute him for that reporting.

Foreign Policy magazine named Greenwald one of the top 100 Global Thinkers for 2013. He was the debut winner, along with "Democracy Now's" Amy Goodman, of the Park Center I.F. Stone Award for Independent Journalism in 2008, and also received the 2010 Online Journalism Award for his investigative work breaking the story of the abusive detention conditions of Chelsea Manning.

For his 2013 NSA reporting, working with his source Edward Snowden, he received the George Polk Award for National Security Reporting; the Gannett Foundation Award for investigative journalism and the Gannett Foundation Watchdog Journalism Award; the Esso Premio for Excellence in Investigative Reporting in Brazil (he was the first non-Brazilian to win); and the Electronic Frontier Foundation's Pioneer Award. The NSA reporting he led for The Guardian was also awarded the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service. A film about the work Greenwald and filmmaker Laura Poitras did with Snowden to report the NSA archive, "CitizenFour," directed by Poitras, was awarded the 2015 Academy Award for Best Documentary.

In 2019, he received the Special Prize from the Vladimir Herzog Institute for his reporting on the Bolsonaro government and pervasive corruption inside the prosecutorial task force that led to the imprisonment of former Brazilian President Lula da Silva. The award is named after the Jewish immigrant journalist who was murdered during an interrogation by the Brazilian military dictatorship in 1977. Several months after the reporting began, Lula was ordered released by the Brazilian Supreme Court, and the former President credited the expose's for his liberty. In early 2020, Brazilian prosecutors sought to prosecute Greenwald in connection with the reporting, but the charges were dismissed due to a Supreme Court ruling, based on the Constitutional right of a free press, that barred the Bolsonaro government from making good on its threats to retaliate against Greenwald.

After working as a journalist at Salon and The Guardian, Greenwald co-founded The Intercept in 2013 along with Poitras and journalist Jeremy Scahill, and co-founded The Intercept Brasil in 2016. He resigned fromThe Intercept in October, 2020, to return to independent journalism.

Greenwald lives in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil with his husband, Congressman David Miranda, their two children, and 26 rescue dogs. In 2017, Greenwald and Miranda created an animal shelter in Brazil supported in part through public donations designed to employ and help exit the streets homeless people who live on the streets with their pets.