[News] Accused Torturer Jon Burge Died Last Week, but His Legacy of Brutal, Racist Policing Lives on in Chicago
Anti-Imperialist News
news at freedomarchives.org
Tue Sep 25 14:32:20 EDT 2018
https://theintercept.com/2018/09/25/jon-burge-chicago-police-torture/
Accused Torturer Jon Burge Died Last Week, but His Legacy of Brutal,
Racist Policing Lives on in Chicago
Micah Uetricht - September 25, 2018
------------------------------------------------------------------------
_The last few_ years have drawn increased attention to police brutality
and racism across the United States. But racist police torture isn’t
usually part of that discussion — unless you’ve paid attention to the
saga of Jon Burge in Chicago. A former police commander, Burge was
indicted in 2008 on perjury and obstruction of justice charges related
to a civil case involving the torture of mostly black suspects in police
custody from 1972 to 1991.
The indictment came several years after the U.S. military was revealed
to have tortured detainees in Iraq, most infamously at Abu Ghraib. The
Iraq charges were abhorrent, clearly war crimes. Yet I remember the
stories feeling far-off at the time. Burge, however, was indicted for
torturing people here, in an American metropolis that I called home
— and not just once, but repeatedly; not briefly, but across nearly two
decades.
Upon his death, Burge had served slightly less than four-and-a-half
years in prison for charges related to torture.
Burge died last week at the age of 70 at his home in Florida, where he
has spent most of his time since his firing from the Chicago Police
Department in 1993 and often spent time on his boat, the “Vigilante.”
Upon his death, Burge had served slightly less than 4 1/2 years in
prison for charges related to torture. Meanwhile, the city of Chicago
and state of Illinois spent well over $100 million on the various
settlements, reparations fees, and legal defense for Burge and his
associates. An unknown number of black men — perhaps over 200 — were
subject to searing physical and emotional pain from Burge’s actions.
The late commander’s crimes are still shocking to assess. But those
crimes also must be seen as of a piece with a broader culture of
brutality and racism in the Chicago Police Department. Burge’s death
came just days into the trial of a white Chicago police officer for the
murder of 17-year-old black teenager Laquan McDonald and in the wake of
a 2017 Department of Justice probe that found
<https://abcnews.go.com/US/takeaways-scathing-department-justice-report-chicago-policing/story?id=44757551>
the Chicago police regularly using excessive and deadly force,
and tolerating racist policing practices.
Burge is now gone. But Chicago will be dealing with the fallout of his
actions for generations to come. The broader culture of racism and
brutality that he was at the helm of in the Chicago Police Department
appears to be firmly intact.
_Burge’s crimes were_ broken wide open by John Conroy, who reported the
story in the Chicago Reader, an alt-weekly. The 1990 article, “House of
Screams
<https://www.chicagoreader.com/chicago/house-of-screams/Content?oid=875107>,”
tells the story of a suspect named Andrew Wilson and his brother Jackie,
who were both accused and later convicted of killing two police
officers. Andrew Wilson told the Reader he was subject to, in Conroy’s
words “burns and electric shock, the shock delivered by two different
devices to his genitals, his ears, his nose, and his fingers” while
being interrogated by officers under Burge’s command. Accusations from
other victims reported by Conroy ranged similar shocks to beatings to
officers putting plastic bags over suspects’ heads; there were stories
of burns from cigarettes and radiators that individuals in police
custody were chained to.
The allegations came out shortly after Burge was first taken to civil
court in 1989 by the People’s Law Office, a Chicago civil rights
practice that would come to represent many of Burge’s torture victims
from that point on. One attorney, Flint Taylor, has written
<http://inthesetimes.com/article/16881/federal_appeals_court_rejects_torture_survivors_case>
extensively
<http://inthesetimes.com/article/17794/to-catch-a-torturer-one-attorneys-28-year-pursuit-of-racist-chicago-police>
about Burge’s
<http://inthesetimes.com/article/18118/jon-burge-torture-reparations>
crimes
<http://inthesetimes.com/article/17213/jon_burge_torture_chicago_has_not_paid_for_his_crimes>
in recent years. (I was often his editor at In These Times, where he
wrote many such reflections.) He described
<http://inthesetimes.com/article/17794/to-catch-a-torturer-one-attorneys-28-year-pursuit-of-racist-chicago-police>
an “unremitting official cover-up that has implicated a series of police
superintendents, numerous prosecutors, more than 30 police detectives
and supervisors, and, most notably, Richard M. Daley,” the city’s former
longtime mayor and a previous state’s attorney. The revelations came to
Taylor and his partners in part through multiple anonymous sources who
worked with Burge, including one who left anonymous voicemails who they
took to calling “Deep Badge.”
After appealing the verdict against Andrew Wilson in a torture case he
brought against Burge, the People’s Law Office’s compiled evidence was
enough to convince the police to reopen its Wilson investigation, as
well as a broader probe into Burge’s torture. He was brought before the
Chicago Police Board in 1992. By that time, the city’s police union had
come to his defense. A fundraiser organized for Burge at a local union
hall drew 3,000 people.
More victims were coming with accusations of mock executions,
sticking a gun in a suspect’s mouth, and the use of a cattle prod,
sometimes on a suspect’s genitals.
More victims, however, were coming forward with accusations: among them,
mock executions through Russian roulette, sticking a gun in a suspect’s
mouth, and the use of a cattle prod, sometimes on a suspect’s genitals.
Taylor claims
<http://inthesetimes.com/article/17213/jon_burge_torture_chicago_has_not_paid_for_his_crimes>
they documented 118 such cases.
“I still have nightmares. I still go through sweats,” Anthony Holmes,
who said he was shocked and suffocated while called a racist epithet by
Burge in the 1970s, stated
<https://www.wbez.org/shows/storycorps/burge-torture-survivor-speaks-i-faced-my-demon/8e21b563-dd92-4982-bd56-456adeb68ccb>
on a local NPR station in 2015. “I faced my demon,” he said of
testifying against Burge.
Burge was suspended from the police department in 1991. But he continued
to collect a pension from the city. Cases against him wended their way
through the courts over the years; while the statute of limitations had
run out to charge Burge with torture, he could be charged with perjury
and obstruction of justice. He was convicted in 2010 and, eventually,
released early for good behavior.
In 2006, Conroy reported
<https://www.chicagoreader.com/chicago/blind-justices/Content?oid=923777>
about a group of alleged torture victims who sought to move their cases
out of the county judiciary because the bench was dotted with police
veterans and those who had worked the cases involving torture in the
first place. In 2016, reporter Maya Dukmasova paraphrased Conroy’s
description of the close associations between the judiciary and the
police
<https://www.chicagoreader.com/Bleader/archives/2018/05/24/that-time-a-cook-county-judge-ruled-on-the-case-of-a-man-he-himself-put-in-prison>
as a system where “people who were complicit in CPD torture made their
way up into the ranks of the judiciary.”
The damage wrought by Burge’s torture is wide and deep: over $100
million in brutality settlements; $5.5 million won by activists for a
reparations fund for victims and their families (as well as a mandatory
curriculum
<https://www.dnainfo.com/chicago/20170913/jefferson-park/jon-burge-police-torture-cps-lesson-plan-reparations-police-brutality/>
for Chicago public school students to learn about Burge’s legacy of
torture); and, most importantly, those individuals who were tortured —
indelibly scarred by the torture itself.
_The story of_ Burge’s torture is unique because it stretched almost two
decades and involved barbaric methods rarely seen on U.S. soil in modern
times. But it was not the end of police brutality and racism in Chicago
— nor, according to federal investigators, was that racism and brutality
isolated to Burge’s command.
Take Chicago police misconduct cases, which are constant and massively
expensive. From January 2005 through June 2008, the city of Chicago paid
about $230 million in police misconduct settlements and judgements —
more, as reporter Mick Dumke put it
<https://www.chicagoreader.com/chicago/the-city-that-pays-out/Content?oid=1104044>,
“than LA, Houston, Phoenix, Philly, and Dallas put together.” Those
numbers included torture payouts, but more recent settlements are still
enormous: Payments for misconduct cases plus lawyers’ fees cost the city
$
<https://www.chicagoreporter.com/police-misconduct-payouts-continue-to-break-the-bank-in-chicago/>371
million
<https://www.chicagoreporter.com/police-misconduct-payouts-continue-to-break-the-bank-in-chicago/>
from 2011 to 2016.
An Intercept investigation
<https://theintercept.com/2016/10/06/in-the-chicago-police-department-if-the-bosses-say-it-didnt-happen-it-didnt-happen/>
in October 2016 detailed a Chicago police tactical gang unit’s alleged
“protection racket” that charged favored drug dealers for impunity
and went after their competition. The police became players in the drug
trade and were rumored to have murdered two drug dealers who wouldn’t
play ball — then retaliated against two whistleblower officers, showing,
in the words of a judge, “extraordinarily serious retaliatory misconduct
by officers at nearly all levels of the CPD hierarchy.”
Investigations <https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/homan-square> by The
Guardian in 2015 revealed a Chicago police “equivalent of a CIA black
site
<https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/feb/24/chicago-police-detain-americans-black-site>”
— a clandestine and unaccountable detention facility — at which more
than 7,000 arrestees
<https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/oct/19/homan-square-chicago-police-disappeared-thousands>
were taken, nearly 6,000 of whom were black. The detainees would
disappear for up to 24 hours at a time, sometimes allegedly suffering
beatings by officers.
And then there is the case of Jason Van Dyke, the police officer who
shot Laquan McDonald 16 times. Like Burge’s operation, the Van Dyke
shooting appears to have led to a massive cover-up
<http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/opinion/zorn/ct-perspec-zorn-vandyke-trial-mcdonald-coverup-lies-0907-20180905-story.html>.
Officers on the scene blatantly lied in multiple aspects of their
accounts of the incident. Chicago police leadership reviewed the dashcam
footage of the scene and approved the obviously false officer reports.
City officials refused to release the video of the shooting for over a year.
The shooting took place in October 2014, as Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s
February 2015 re-election campaign was heating up. The city fought to
keep the footage out of the public eye for as long as possible and only
brought charges against Van Dyke a few hours before the video was released.
--
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