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| By The Free Press |
It’s Thursday, May 8, 2025. This is The Front Page, your daily window into the world of The Free Press—and our take on the world at large. Today: How will Pakistan respond to the strikes from India? Why is former president Biden suddenly on a press tour? And is the main side effect of weight-loss drugs. . . happiness? All that and more coming up.
But first: Chicago police officers are killing themselves at an alarming rate. We wanted to know why.
Here’s our Olivia Reingold with the story behind her investigation:
I’m always looking for an excuse to report a story in Chicago, grim as the news there often is. It’s the home of my longtime boyfriend, so I often find myself typing phrases like Chicago lawsuit or Chicago protest into search bars, to see what’s brewing in the Windy City.
That’s how I stumbled across local TV coverage about Malissa Torres, a 34-year-old police officer who killed herself inside her station bathroom on April 10, 2025. The more I read, the more I realized she was far from alone.
When I started picking up the phone, my go-to Chicago sources told me off the record that the police department’s suicide problem was “staggering.”
“It’s got to have been dozens of suicides at this point,” one said.
So I went digging. The best public estimates were mysteriously vague—“two dozen” or “more than 30” since 2018. I submitted four public records requests: two to the Chicago Police Department, one to the police pension board, and one to the Office of Emergency Management & Communications. Two were denied (I’m still fighting those).
But then the pension board called me back. Out of 187 police deaths on their books over the past decade, 39 had been ruled suicides. “That’s about one out of every five deaths,” the caller pointed out.
Their list ended in 2024, so I added four more cases I had tracked through a spreadsheet I built. That brought the toll to 43.
Then it got worse.
A few days later, I opened an unexpected email from Chicago Public Safety. Inside were the names, badge numbers, ranks, and duty statuses of every officer who had died. And in black and white, the toll was even higher than anyone had admitted: Over the past decade, 53 officers had died by suicide.
This is the story of how a mental-health crisis quietly took root inside the Chicago Police Department—and how it exploded in the wake of the Black Lives Matter movement. It’s a cautionary tale about what happens to officers when city officials turn against their own police force. More than that, though, it’s a story about how bad ideas embraced by political elites wind up hurting the everyday people they were supposed to help.
—Olivia Reingold
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A Pogrom Is Brewing in Canada | |||
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Canada has become one of the most antisemitic countries in the Western world, reports Casey Babb. From October 7, 2023, through the end of 2024, antisemitism skyrocketed 670 percent. Open calls for jihad in Jewish neighborhoods have become the norm in a country that prides itself on tolerance. How will this end?
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Joe Biden Has No Regrets, and Many Senior Moments | |||
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Joe Biden is back—or at least out of the house. In his first interview since leaving office, the former president went off on his successor (Trump is “not behaving like a Republican president”) and answered one long-awaited question—does he regret not dropping out of the presidential race sooner? The answer may not surprise you.
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Mississippi Schools Are Better Than Yours | |||
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Long the target of elitist jokes, Mississippi now has the fastest-improving school system in the country, including among black students. The state spends comparatively little per pupil, yet students are now regularly outperforming their peers in better-funded blue-state schools. So what’s the cause of the Mississippi education miracle?
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