An Illinois appeals court on Friday overturned an injunction that had blocked the release of decades of records of citizen complaints against Chicago police officers, ruling that the documents must be made public.

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Craig Futterman, a University of Chicago law professor who has studied police misconduct, and activist and journalist Jamie Kalven started the battle for access to the records to find out how the Police Department handled citizen complaints.

In a ruling on a lawsuit by Kalven, the state appeals court ruled in 2014 that records of citizen complaints should be made public under open-records law.

That same year, the Tribune and Chicago Sun-Times filed FOIA requests seeking the names of officers who had received at least one complaint and whether any disciplinary action had been taken against them, among other details. The requests sought the records going back to 1967.

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