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February 7, 2019 3:06 PM Subscribe
The Battle Over Teaching Chicago’s Schools About Police Torture and Reparations: A little-known city law has educators figuring out how to talk to eighth and tenth grade students about the history of Chicago police abuse.
Like so many new curriculum units in so many high schools across America, this one began with the teacher switching off the lights and playing a video. Who was Jon Burge? The video supplied the answer. Burge was a former Chicago Police Department detective and area commander. Between 1972 and 1991 he either directly participated in or implicitly approved the torture of at least — and this is an extremely conservative estimate — 118 Chicagoans. Burge and his subordinates — known variously as the Midnight Crew, Burge’s Ass Kickers, and the A-Team — beat their suspects, suffocated them, subjected them to mock executions at gunpoint, raped them with sex toys, and hooked electroshock machines up to their genitals, their gums, their fingers, their earlobes, overwhelming their bodies with live voltage until they agreed: yes, they’d done it, whatever they’d been accused of, they’d sign the confession. The members of the Midnight Crew were predominately white men. Almost all of their victims were black men from Chicago’s South and West Sides. Some had committed the crimes to which they were forced to confess; many had not. The cops in question called the electroshock machines “nigger boxes.”As for Jon Burge's thoughts on the reparations provided to his victims?
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This classroom initiative is part of a historic, novel and perplexingly under-covered development in the ever-more urgent search for solutions to the cumulative harm inflicted on Americans — especially black Americans — in the name of law and order. On May 6, 2015, in response to decades of local activism, Chicago’s city council passed an ordinance officially recognizing that Burge and his subordinates had engaged in torture, condemning that torture, and offering his victims (or at least some of them) compensation for their suffering. The ordinance is a singular document in American history. Torture accountability — even basic torture honesty — has been a perennial nonstarter in American politics, all the more so in our post-9/11 condition of perpetual war. Reparations, especially those with a racial component, have long been treated as, alternately: an incoherent absurdity; a frightening threat; a nice-sounding but impractical rallying cry; or, more recently, in the wake of the National Magazine Award-nominated Atlantic essay by Ta-Nehisi Coates, as a worthy (but still essentially utopian) demand. But within Chicago city limits, reparations for police torture isn’t just a thought exercise, a rhetorical expression about what should exist in a better world. It’s Chicago City Council Resolution SR2015-256: the law of the land.
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This was why the curriculum was called “Reparations Won”: it was meant to be more than a catalogue of woe. It was also a testament to the possibility of pushing back and changing the world. There were all the activist groups who kept showing up, year after year, decade after decade, asking for torture accountability. One of these groups, We Charge Genocide, even sent a delegation of young Chicagoans to Switzerland in 2014 to talk about Chicago police in front of the United Nations Committee Against Torture. (One member of that delegation, Douglas told them, was a Lincoln Park alumnus — one of her former students.) There were the lawyers who took the cases of Midnight Crew victims long before anyone had even heard of the Midnight Crew. There was Joey Mogul, the lawyer who wrote out the reparations ordinance as an entry for a conceptual art show with a torture-accountability theme. There was the county medical examiner who insisted, despite police pressure, on making a formal record of the injuries sustained by Andrew Wilson, Burge’s first accuser to get any traction in court. There was the cop, or the multiple cops, who when they heard about the lawyers bringing torture cases against the CPD, started anonymously mailing them notes, feeding them names to dig into.
So many people deciding to do nothing — to keep their heads down and not cause trouble, to not risk the danger of upsetting the system.
So many people deciding to do something — to insist on things being different.
In 2015, when SR2015-256 was signed, he was interviewed by Martin Preib for a now-defunct blog called The Conviction Project. “I find it hard to believe,” he said, “that the city’s political leadership could even contemplate giving ‘reparations’ to human vermin.”For more reading on Jon Burge, the Chicago police's history of torture, and the subsequent fight for reparations:
I couldn't bread all the links in one sitting. But thanks for posting them.
Damn.
posted by The Underpants Monster at 3:36 PM on February 7, 2019
Damn.
posted by The Underpants Monster at 3:36 PM on February 7, 2019
This - not the "ticking time bomb" scenario beloved of rightist debaters - is a paradigmatic use of torture: coerce confessions from innocent people and terrorize a subjugated group. This is why it was considered to be antithetical to our values and legal ideals.
posted by thelonius at 3:39 PM on February 7, 2019 [16 favorites]
posted by thelonius at 3:39 PM on February 7, 2019 [16 favorites]
He's in Apollo Beach? That's Tampa!
posted by toodleydoodley at 3:56 PM on February 7, 2019
posted by toodleydoodley at 3:56 PM on February 7, 2019
toodleydoodley, he's dead. Which is almost a shame. He wasn't really a monster, just another cop who didn't view other people as actual human beings, just things to be played with and broken. If he's remembered as a monster, then this, as usual, gets pushed onto a few bad apples, instead of looking at what kind of systematic denial was necessary for all of these people to be tortured and destroyed like this. That said, if there are reports from the cemetery of human excrement being found on his grave, I would probably be happy.
I read the longreads piece and wow. I'm glad this exists. I wish it existed across the country. It's going to be fought in all of the police enclaves across the city, but I doubt it's something that could be stricken from the curriculum. That said, whenever we face the history of the brutality of what the US or other power structure has done, there will be those who remain willfully ignorant. The belief in a just world fallacy is strong. No one wants to believe that that could be them on either end of the machine.
posted by Hactar at 4:19 PM on February 7, 2019 [6 favorites]
I read the longreads piece and wow. I'm glad this exists. I wish it existed across the country. It's going to be fought in all of the police enclaves across the city, but I doubt it's something that could be stricken from the curriculum. That said, whenever we face the history of the brutality of what the US or other power structure has done, there will be those who remain willfully ignorant. The belief in a just world fallacy is strong. No one wants to believe that that could be them on either end of the machine.
posted by Hactar at 4:19 PM on February 7, 2019 [6 favorites]
She promised, in the paraphrase of Alex Nitkin, the DNAinfo reporter, to “leave the Burge episode squarely in the past.” “There are a lot of bad apples in every profession,” Skowronek said. “And we’ll try to portray that to our kids.”
Just so we're all clear, reports broke of black-ops style torture site in use by the CPD in 2015.
Since then, Mayor Emanuel has used the homicide rate to call for a more robust, aggressive police force. Traffic stops have tripled since 2015, when they were forced to stop 'stop and frisk'. Police have tried using big data to predict where the largest threats are (by looking at likely perpetrators) and aggressively stop crime before it happens. And of course, there's also the Homeland Security money.
This wasn't one bad leader, and it's not in the past.
posted by dinty_moore at 5:59 PM on February 7, 2019 [14 favorites]
Just so we're all clear, reports broke of black-ops style torture site in use by the CPD in 2015.
Since then, Mayor Emanuel has used the homicide rate to call for a more robust, aggressive police force. Traffic stops have tripled since 2015, when they were forced to stop 'stop and frisk'. Police have tried using big data to predict where the largest threats are (by looking at likely perpetrators) and aggressively stop crime before it happens. And of course, there's also the Homeland Security money.
This wasn't one bad leader, and it's not in the past.
posted by dinty_moore at 5:59 PM on February 7, 2019 [14 favorites]
He wasn't really a monster, just another cop who didn't view other people as actual human beings, just things to be played with and broken.
I dunno, that sounds like pretty classic monster territory to me. To the extent that I'm ever comfortable applying that term to a person, I'm pretty comfortable applying it here. That people in Burges' general mold are common in the world does not make them less hideous.
posted by Anticipation Of A New Lover's Arrival, The at 2:34 AM on February 8, 2019 [3 favorites]
I dunno, that sounds like pretty classic monster territory to me. To the extent that I'm ever comfortable applying that term to a person, I'm pretty comfortable applying it here. That people in Burges' general mold are common in the world does not make them less hideous.
posted by Anticipation Of A New Lover's Arrival, The at 2:34 AM on February 8, 2019 [3 favorites]
Although if you're offering it, I would certainly agree that stopping this kind of activity involves accepting that "monsters" like Burges are in fact complete human beings, and engaging with them as such. It's no good to just write off the problem and dismiss the perpetrators as monsters. But remorselessly torturing hundreds of people is quite monstrous.
posted by Anticipation Of A New Lover's Arrival, The at 2:38 AM on February 8, 2019 [1 favorite]
posted by Anticipation Of A New Lover's Arrival, The at 2:38 AM on February 8, 2019 [1 favorite]
The other thing this whole affair does is it sets a lower bound on police corruption and racism in America. That is the extreme end of police injustice (one hopes), but corruption and racism exist on a continuum.
In one city, there was a squad of cops who tortured hundreds of black men to extract false confessions from them. How many more would take the opportunity to shoot a black man if they thought they could get away with it? How many would extract a false confession through simple psychological pressure, or write a black man up on false charges on the basis that, "He must have done something to deserve it?" How many would plant evidence to help put someone in prison who they think probably did the crime but against whom there is little proof? And how many would stand quietly by while their coworkers do these things, would protect them by saying nothing when they know full well of the abuses that they have committed? If there are some who would kidnap and torture without a shred of remorse, how many others are committing these other crimes, which only seem lesser by comparison to the monumental atrocity of mass torture?
posted by Anticipation Of A New Lover's Arrival, The at 2:52 AM on February 8, 2019 [2 favorites]
In one city, there was a squad of cops who tortured hundreds of black men to extract false confessions from them. How many more would take the opportunity to shoot a black man if they thought they could get away with it? How many would extract a false confession through simple psychological pressure, or write a black man up on false charges on the basis that, "He must have done something to deserve it?" How many would plant evidence to help put someone in prison who they think probably did the crime but against whom there is little proof? And how many would stand quietly by while their coworkers do these things, would protect them by saying nothing when they know full well of the abuses that they have committed? If there are some who would kidnap and torture without a shred of remorse, how many others are committing these other crimes, which only seem lesser by comparison to the monumental atrocity of mass torture?
posted by Anticipation Of A New Lover's Arrival, The at 2:52 AM on February 8, 2019 [2 favorites]
Since then, Mayor Emanuel has used the homicide rate to call for a more robust, aggressive police force. Traffic stops have tripled since 2015, when they were forced to stop 'stop and frisk'. Police have tried using big data to predict where the largest threats are (by looking at likely perpetrators) and aggressively stop crime before it happens.
That's a bit of data cherry picking. Traffic stops dropped dramatically in 2015 because when the Laquan video was released police went on an unofficial work to rule campaign and effectively stopped policing anything while blaming it on ACLU lawsuit requried forms.
posted by srboisvert at 7:56 AM on February 8, 2019
That's a bit of data cherry picking. Traffic stops dropped dramatically in 2015 because when the Laquan video was released police went on an unofficial work to rule campaign and effectively stopped policing anything while blaming it on ACLU lawsuit requried forms.
posted by srboisvert at 7:56 AM on February 8, 2019
Okay, I'll grant that - I'd seen the 3x statistic, but I'd forgotten/was unaware of the reason. Though really, the fact that the reaction to Laquan McDonald's death (and, like, the bare possibility of some sort of discipline against one police officer for murdering someone) was a concentrated protest in favor of letting the incident go is not making me feel any better about the probability of reform in the Chicago Police Department.
posted by dinty_moore at 8:55 AM on February 8, 2019
posted by dinty_moore at 8:55 AM on February 8, 2019
I'm fascinated by the student experience, and I'm glad the author was able to get that in so much depth. For them, they have the same variation in engagement based not on the subject matter but just how much they're engaged with school generally. And I'm impressed by how the teacher handled the varying levels of knowledge and engagement to try and help them understand this material that has a real bearing on their lives!
posted by epersonae at 9:10 AM on February 8, 2019 [1 favorite]
posted by epersonae at 9:10 AM on February 8, 2019 [1 favorite]
Never underestimate the banality of evil.
posted by The Underpants Monster at 11:59 AM on February 8, 2019
posted by The Underpants Monster at 11:59 AM on February 8, 2019
I find it interesting how often the 'humanity' of creeps like Burge end up being debated in discussions such as this. What if he and his kind are or were pronounced 'monsters?' Who gets to decide that? Does some different set of conditions apply then?
When I was a kid we just made note of the fact that such people existed and infested all PDs by default. US society supported them then and supports them now. Those Chicago students already know all the history they need to know.
posted by metagnathous at 12:05 PM on February 8, 2019 [1 favorite]
When I was a kid we just made note of the fact that such people existed and infested all PDs by default. US society supported them then and supports them now. Those Chicago students already know all the history they need to know.
posted by metagnathous at 12:05 PM on February 8, 2019 [1 favorite]
He wasn't really a monster, just another cop who didn't view other people as actual human beings, just things to be played with and broken.
Yeah add me to the chorus that this is pretty much textbook monster definition.
If he's remembered as a monster, then this, as usual, gets pushed onto a few bad apples, instead of looking at what kind of systematic denial was necessary for all of these people to be tortured and destroyed like this.
Listen I see your good intent here, but I think you're offering monsters too much generosity. You seem to have ruled out the possibility that Burge was just one of MANY monsters in this police force, all of whom were either participatory or perhaps slightly-less-monstrously in systematic denial.
The whole fucking barrel could be bad. That's kind of how bad apples work.
posted by allkindsoftime at 1:12 PM on February 8, 2019 [2 favorites]
Yeah add me to the chorus that this is pretty much textbook monster definition.
If he's remembered as a monster, then this, as usual, gets pushed onto a few bad apples, instead of looking at what kind of systematic denial was necessary for all of these people to be tortured and destroyed like this.
Listen I see your good intent here, but I think you're offering monsters too much generosity. You seem to have ruled out the possibility that Burge was just one of MANY monsters in this police force, all of whom were either participatory or perhaps slightly-less-monstrously in systematic denial.
The whole fucking barrel could be bad. That's kind of how bad apples work.
posted by allkindsoftime at 1:12 PM on February 8, 2019 [2 favorites]
What excellent journalism.
...wasn't really a monster, just another cop who...
No. "just" is a dismissive word, in a stroke denying facts and trying to put a new face on those facts. Like when someone tells you something, then says ..."but..." everything they said before the "but" is worthless. The only 'just' here should be 'justice' - for all.
posted by dbmcd at 3:11 PM on February 8, 2019
...wasn't really a monster, just another cop who...
No. "just" is a dismissive word, in a stroke denying facts and trying to put a new face on those facts. Like when someone tells you something, then says ..."but..." everything they said before the "but" is worthless. The only 'just' here should be 'justice' - for all.
posted by dbmcd at 3:11 PM on February 8, 2019
When I was a kid we just made note of the fact that such people existed and infested all PDs by default. US society supported them then and supports them now. Those Chicago students already know all the history they need to know.
I mean, you'll notice that only some of the kids in the longreads are getting that education. The kids on the Northwest side, those kids whose parents are cops? They're not getting the same in-depth experience that the Lincoln High kids are getting, or aren't getting anything at all.
I was definitely taught to expect cops to be like this - even by other cops. Black cops, mostly, but still. One of those cops let us know what to do and what to ask for when the police stop you. A teacher in junior high warned us to do whatever is in your power to prevent them from transferring you from station to station. I honestly didn't realize that the traffic stop/DWB part of the driver's ed class wasn't standard until I went away to college. But these conversations tend to happen with the probable victims, while those who aren't in danger are told that everything is fine, there's no problem there. A bit like how we tend to teach girls to not get raped, but don't bother teaching men (or anyone) about what consent looks like.
If it really was one bad apple, cops wouldn't have any issues having their kids learn about Jon Burge. They wouldn't have any issues with cops who murder kids getting punished for their actions. They'd be outraged at that one guy fucking it up for the rest of them.
posted by dinty_moore at 7:45 PM on February 8, 2019 [5 favorites]
I mean, you'll notice that only some of the kids in the longreads are getting that education. The kids on the Northwest side, those kids whose parents are cops? They're not getting the same in-depth experience that the Lincoln High kids are getting, or aren't getting anything at all.
I was definitely taught to expect cops to be like this - even by other cops. Black cops, mostly, but still. One of those cops let us know what to do and what to ask for when the police stop you. A teacher in junior high warned us to do whatever is in your power to prevent them from transferring you from station to station. I honestly didn't realize that the traffic stop/DWB part of the driver's ed class wasn't standard until I went away to college. But these conversations tend to happen with the probable victims, while those who aren't in danger are told that everything is fine, there's no problem there. A bit like how we tend to teach girls to not get raped, but don't bother teaching men (or anyone) about what consent looks like.
If it really was one bad apple, cops wouldn't have any issues having their kids learn about Jon Burge. They wouldn't have any issues with cops who murder kids getting punished for their actions. They'd be outraged at that one guy fucking it up for the rest of them.
posted by dinty_moore at 7:45 PM on February 8, 2019 [5 favorites]
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posted by the agents of KAOS at 3:12 PM on February 7, 2019