JUSTICE
A Mother’s Investigation Q&A with Shapearl Wells, mother of the murdered Courtney Copeland and co-host of Somebody, a podcast exploring racial disparities and distrust of the Chicago Police Department, and Invisible Institute journalist Alison Flowers BY AMY QIN
Before George Floyd begged Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin for his life under a lethal chokehold, on the night of March 4, 2016, twenty-two-year old Courtney Copeland had begged Chicago police officers for help after he was shot in his car near the 25th District police station on Chicago’s northwest side. Copeland could likely have survived the injury had the officers on duty that night treated him as a victim of a shooting, rather than a suspect. But the officers handcuffed Copeland and delayed calling an ambulance. And when the ambulance did arrive, it took him to a trauma center fifteen minutes farther than the nearest one. It was this fifteen-minute disparity that determined Copeland’s fate: his heart stopped just four minutes before they arrived at the hospital. Somebody is a podcast by and about Copeland’s mother, Shapearl Wells, and her search for answers when the Chicago Police Department didn’t provide them. It took Wells four years, and a partnership with journalists at the Invisible Institute, to uncover information that should have been revealed days after the murder. And still to this day, no one has been charged in Copeland’s murder. Wells is the podcast’s primary narrator. There is something special about that. You can feel her tenacity and strength. But you also get a sense of what it is like to be a mother who has lost her son, and who also now faces a system that places little value on his life. In this way, Somebody offers a unique perspective on police accountability and the tenuous, tense relationship police have with the communities they’re supposed to protect. Somebody is a seven-part podcast (plus a bonus episode, a June conversation between Wells and Invisible Institute director Jamie Kalven) produced by the Invisible Institute,
The Intercept, and Topic Studios, in partnership with iHeartMedia and Tenderfoot TV. It is available to stream on all podcast platforms. The Weekly interviewed Wells and Invisible Institute producer Alison Flowers about the production of the podcast, the investigation, and what it means for police accountability and citizen trust going forward. This interview has been edited for clarity. How did the idea for Somebody come about, and why did you choose to make it a podcast? Alison Flowers: During Shapearl’s investigation, she had made these voice diaries that were very powerful and emotional. She also had the recordings of her conversation with police, so we thought a podcast would be the best way to tell this multi-part story. It also had to do with Shapearl herself, and the way she really commands the story. In the tradition of investigative journalism podcasts, typically it’s the reporter who would host, but we decided to disrupt the genre and asked Shapearl if she would voice the podcast; we felt [this] made the story more inclusive. I think journalists need to be okay with taking a back seat, and sharing more power with their sources, and work[ing] with them to tell their own stories. I think th[at this is] part of why it’s really resonating with listeners. Shapearl, have you ever hosted a podcast before or done a similar project? Shapearl Wells: Absolutely not. This was the first time that I had done something this extraordinary.
AF: From a craft perspective, we did multiple in-depth interviews with Shapearl near the beginning of our relationship with her. This served as a template for the series. Every script went through multiple rounds of feedback from Shapearl, even when we were in the studio to report the narration, we made even more tweaks based on how she would prefer to say it or how it came out naturally in the moment. Shapearl was involved every step of the way, and definitely took the lead in the process. What was it like revisiting all the moments of your investigation as the host of this podcast? SW: It took me back to remembering what happened with my son, it took me through all those moments. It was difficult, but it was a necessary process in order to get the story told. I felt like it was a labor of love. Even though there was so much pain involved in it, I thought that it was essential that someone hear what happened to Courtney. Initially your investigation led you to think that the police were responsible for shooting Courtney. How did you work through the production of the podcast as what you were learning about what happened to Courtney changed? AF: Even while we were putting the series together, we were still investigating. We had entire episodes turned upside down because of developments in the case. SW: In episode three, when we experienced the shift away from thinking the police did it, that was when I went through the whole process of ‘if the police did it versus if the
police didn’t do it’. Everyone was on the same page in that we wanted to come to a conclusion, but we wanted the evidence to lead us to whatever it was. Everybody makes mistakes, and we recognized the mistake and we didn’t continue it. We didn’t continue that it was CPD [who did it], instead we corrected it and continued with our investigation. When Jamie left me that day, which I say in the podcast, [he said] we now need to ‘investigate our own investigation,’ which means that we want to be one-hundred percent correct on everything before we took this investigation out, because integrity is the most important part of the podcast. AF: When we walked back our thinking about the police’s involvement in Courtney’s murder, what we realized is we end up with a story about everyday systemic racism in Chicago. It looked at the encounters that contribute to such discord and distrust between the public, especially communities of color, and Chicago police. Looking at what we thought might have been one of the rare, yet terrible, incidents of the police killing a young Black man actually allowed us to explore a much more common occurrence: negative and racist encounters that citizens have with the police. That was an important shift, and it also allowed us to look at other aspects of police accountability: it’s not just about police killing Black people, it’s about deprioritizing their cases [and] having such a low murder solve rate for Black citizens in Chicago and conducting very superficial investigations. All of that was part of this picture of police accountability, that we tried to create from multiple angles. One of the most powerful parts of the podcast for me were the recordings of the conversations Shapearl had with the investigating officers. Shapearl, how did you feel when you were in those rooms? SW: My encounters with the CPD were very hostile. They were very disrespectful and dismissive to me. I felt that I was the only one who cared about solving my son’s muder. I still feel that way. I still feel they didn’t do a good enough job to solve his murder. Essentially what the podcast breaks down is that the information I gave them four days after my son was murdered, was really the information they needed to solve the murder. To this day, they still haven’t followed up with that information. My encounters with police just show me the JUNE 24, 2020 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 9
