The Torture Letters: Reckoning with Police Violence - Brossura

Ralph, Laurence

Brossura

ISBN 10: 022665009X ISBN 13: 9780226650098

Casa editrice: University of Chicago Press, 2020

Riassunto

Torture is an open secret in Chicago. Nobody in power wants to acknowledge this grim reality, but everyone knows it happens—and that the torturers are the police. Three to five new claims are submitted to the Torture Inquiry and Relief Commission of Illinois each week. Four hundred cases are currently pending investigation. Between 1972 and 1991, at least 125 black suspects were tortured by Chicago police officers working under former Police Commander Jon Burge. As the more recent revelations from the Homan Square “black site” show, that brutal period is far from a historical anomaly. For more than fifty years, police officers who took an oath to protect and serve have instead beaten, electrocuted, suffocated, and raped hundreds—perhaps thousands—of Chicago residents.

In The Torture Letters, Laurence Ralph chronicles the history of torture in Chicago, the burgeoning activist movement against police violence, and the American public’s complicity in perpetuating torture at home and abroad. Engaging with a long tradition of epistolary meditations on racism in the United States, from James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time to Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Between the World and Me, Ralph offers in this book a collection of open letters written to protesters, victims, students, and others. Through these moving, questing, enraged letters, Ralph bears witness to police violence that began in Burge’s Area Two and follows the city’s networks of torture to the global War on Terror. From Vietnam to Geneva to Guantanamo Bay—Ralph’s story extends as far as the legacy of American imperialism. Combining insights from fourteen years of research on torture with testimonies of victims of police violence, retired officers, lawyers, and protesters, this is a powerful indictment of police violence and a fierce challenge to all Americans to demand an end to the systems that support it.

With compassion and careful skill, Ralph uncovers the tangled connections among law enforcement, the political machine, and the courts in Chicago, amplifying the voices of torture victims who are still with us—and lending a voice to those long deceased.

Su questo libro

Informazioni sull'autore

Laurence Ralph is a professor of anthropology at Princeton University. He is the author of Renegade Dreams: Living with Injury in Gangland Chicago, also published by the University of Chicago Press.
 

Estratto. © Ristampato con autorizzazione. Tutti i diritti riservati.

The Torture Letters

Reckoning with Police Violence

By Laurence Ralph

The University of Chicago Press

Copyright © 2019 Laurence Ralph
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-226-65009-8

Contents

Prologue: A Half Century of Torture, 
Introduction, 
PART I The Black Box, 
PART II The B-Team, 
PART III Charging Genocide, 
PART IV Bad Guys, 
CONCLUSION, 
EPILOGUE: A MODEL FOR JUSTICE, 
Appendix, 
Notes, 
References, 
Index, 

CHAPTER 1

PART I The Black Box

An Open Letter to the Boy and Girl with Matching Airbrushed Book Bags on the Corner of Lawndale Avenue and Cermak Road

I began to worry — I mean, really worry — about police violence in Chicago back in the summer of 2004. That's when I saw you — a young man and young woman, barely teenagers — in your white shirts and khaki pants, on your knees at the corner of Lawndale Avenue and Cermak Road. Where I grew up in Columbia, Maryland, those clothes would've been private school uniforms. But in Chicago, I've been told, that lack of hue in your collared shirt is supposed to mean that you are public school students and not gang members — who, at that intersection, supposedly wear red and black.

I know you are much older now, and yet when I see Black and Brown teenagers of today's Chicago, bustling down the streets, flirting with each other, clumped together over someone's cell phone, I always flash back to that scene over a decade ago.

Four police cars were parked along the curb. Six officers frisked you on the sidewalk. The cops smiled at one another as they emptied the contents of your book bags into the gutter. Your bags were both white, each with a different word similarly airbrushed in graffiti letters — your names, I assumed, though I couldn't make them out from where I stood. All I could tell was that one of the names was written in green, and the other was in pink. I remember trying to read those letters so that I could yell your names, pretend that I was a friend or relative, and ask if you were OK.

I know how long your encounter lasted because I clocked it: twenty-six minutes, forty-three seconds. I watched the whole time from across the street, transfixed. Later, I told my brother that I watched you so that I could be a witness in the event the incident went awry. But that was only half-true. I also watched because I was afraid and didn't know what else to do.

I had moved to your city two weeks before this incident. And although I moved there to attend the University of Chicago, and to become a professor, tweed jacket and all the rest, I was afraid that I was witnessing an altercation with the police that I, too, might eventually have.

At the same time, I was afraid because I was seeing the past.

When I was around the same age as you were then, or at least the same size — which is to say, around twelve years old — I found myself in a similar position. My two older brothers and I had just moved from Baltimore to Columbia, Maryland, about a half hour's drive south. We decided to go to the mall. We must have worn our Baltimoreness in our walk, in our lingo, or more likely, on our flesh, because before long a plainclothes police officer was following us from store to store. We knew full well that a strange man was bearing down on us, and we fought the temptation to run. I wouldn't have admitted it to myself then, but I felt scared.

Before long, the man ordered us to stop. He frisked both of my brothers, who were fifteen and sixteen, against a rail on the second floor. I was within arm's reach of my brothers, but the cop ignored me. Maybe because I was so puny he thought I was irrelevant. I have to admit: I was relieved he wasn't touching me. But despite that relief, I could feel myself in my own skin unlike ever before. Adrenaline spiked my senses. All of sudden I felt hair stand up from the follicles on my forearms. I could catch the sound of people chattering below me. I could smell fried potato wedges from the Boardwalk Café on the floor below, where a crowd of people gathered, eyes upward, watching the commotion against the second-story railing. I had been in that restaurant, eating those thick fries, just a few hours earlier. I wanted desperately to return to that moment.

I looked down at the people looking up at me, and I imagined them to be shaking their heads in contempt. An uneasy feeling settled in my stomach and stayed there. I began to worry that a classmate from my new school might see me, tell others, and someone would make fun of me. And then I would be forced to fight. Or even worse: word would spread about the incident and no one would want to be my friend. Then I felt ashamed of how quickly my embarrassment had taken the place of fear. I should still be afraid, I thought to myself, because my brothers had their arms behind their backs and I could tell they were scared.

The cop took my eldest brother, Wolé, through one of those doors that you never notice along the corridors of a mall until all your senses are heightened and you start to notice everything. He didn't say anything to me or my other brother, Michael, so we were at a loss. Eventually, terrified, we called our parents. Four hours later, Wolé was released, but only after my mother and father showed up and threatened legal action. The cop had found no evidence to confirm his suspicion that Wolé had been doing something wrong. Only then did my relief feel justified and right.

When the police released you, West Side Chicago teenagers with matching airbrushed book bags, I felt a similar kind of relief. But I also felt a familiar combination of cowardice, anger, guilt, frustration — and yes, fear.

No doubt living in Chicago has taught you valuable lessons about the police. That early encounter with the mall cop taught me valuable lessons, too. When I related the story of that incident to my friends and their parents, they told me far-worse stories of being followed, frisked, humiliated, and even brutalized, for walking in malls or lingering in amusement parks, or for just going to school or coming home from work.

That was when I first learned that the police do not always live by the code of serving and protecting, or at least that they don't serve and protect all citizens equally. Still, as a preteen, I didn't understand just how far certain officers departed from that code, or the extent to which they were allowed to get away with doing so — much less why. I believe this knowledge is crucial for any young person of color growing up in the United States.

I am writing to you today because when I see kids in Chicago being stopped and frisked by the cops, I always feel guilty for not knowing what to do, just like I still feel guilty for not helping you that day. I'm also writing because we all need to talk — whenever and however we can — about the awful things that we have to deal with as Black people in this country, as well as what we can do about them.

* * *

Even though I still don't know what to do, and I still don't know how to solve this scourge, I have done something. I have done, as an academic, the thing I know how to do best: research and study and write. So, I started a research project about the history of police violence in your city. For this project I've interviewed youth of color in Chicago and talked about their experiences with the police. What they said would probably sound familiar to you, given that they are your younger brothers, sisters, nieces, nephews, friends — in a way, your younger selves. Although you two are now adults, and probably already have a general idea of the feelings young people might have toward the police, I want to give you a taste of what they said for a particular reason. Before my interviews and group discussions with Chicago youth, I would always tell them about witnessing your stop- and-frisk encounter as a way to give them some background on my earliest memory of the Chicago police. What happened to you has been an important point of departure for my research, and it has invited sobering reflections from the people I speak with.

In a discussion at Harold Washington Library in the spring of 2016, for instance, Nekia explained to a group of thirteen teenagers that when her brother was around fifteen (the same age she was then), he got arrested. "The police came in my house one night and grabbed him. I was scared," she said.

Nekia saw the police put handcuffs on her brother, and she didn't understand why they were taking him away. "My mom was there, so of course she was trying to calm me down. But she was distracted because I have older siblings. I'm the youngest of seven," she said. Her brothers and sisters were angry and getting more and more agitated, which put pressure on Nekia's mother to make sure no one else went to jail. "I definitely didn't understand what was happening. There was a lot going on, and I was just like, 'Where is he going?'"

Martin could sympathize. He had faced a similar situation. His father was arrested in his home when he was five years old. "I didn't understand what was happening," he said. All he knew then was that "there were a lot of lights."

After Martin had finished sharing his story, Phillip spoke up. "My first memory of the police is from when I was thirteen," he said, "and there was a shooting on the block." Phillip had been walking in a large group with his brothers and cousins — eight of them in all. An unmarked police car braked right in front of them, and an officer jumped out and told everybody to put their hands above their heads.

"He started groping us in our private parts to look for guns and stuff. I'd say it's a negative memory because I don't want another grown man touching my private area. I was thirteen. What would I be doing with a gun?" said Phillip.

"I remember it like yesterday, and it still bothers me," Phillip continued. "But I'm trying to get over it."

Like Phillip, what happened to you at Lawndale and Cermak is probably something you've worked hard to "get over" and move beyond. But I want you to know that, just as your experience affected me, it is now affecting a younger generation of Chicagoans who are searching for a way to process their feelings about the police.

I plan to write letters based on my research on police violence to all of the youth of color in Chicago. By writing to this larger group, I hope that my silence that day in 2004 will be replaced by a loud voice that insists on my apology to you for not stepping forward back then. Through my letters, I'll also be talking to the big, beautiful community of kids of color who still have to reckon with the same institutional racism that you faced on that day.

I cannot change that day. And I cannot change the pain and frustration and confusion you must have felt, walking home with your heads hung low. But what I hope to do is make something useful from that awful moment. I imagine you now, receiving this letter in the mail. I hope that if you could read this letter, you would give me your blessing, that you would feel the pain of that day — the burdens of that mistreatment — growing into something else, a greater sense of purpose, perhaps. When I think about that possibility, I can't help but smile.

An Open Letter to Chicago's Youth of Color

I am writing this letter to you, the tens of thousands of Black and Brown young men and young women living in Chicago. You don't know me. But I know you; or rather, I know what can happen to you. I am writing to all of you because you are the next generation who has to fear violence from the same people who are tasked with protecting you and serving you.

The police department of your city is full, I am sure, of lots of officers who care about the law and serve the community. But the police department is also full of racism and abuse. I am guessing that many of you have already felt this; some of you have been pulled over for no reason or arrested just for being on a certain street corner at a certain time of night. What I hope none of you has experienced, however, is that the dirty looks and the illegal searches are not the extent of it. They are merely part of a long and frightening spectrum of mistreatment by the police — a spectrum (or what scholars call the use-of-force continuum) that extends all the way to the most egregious acts of torture you can imagine. For as long as you have been alive (and much longer than that), certain members of the Chicago Police Department have been torturing your fellow Chicagoans.

I am writing because you need to be aware of what could happen while you walk in this world. And I am also writing to you on behalf of those men and women who have suffered greatly at the hands of the police. When I talk to torture survivors, you are the group of people that they want most desperately to address. They hope that by learning about torture, you might be able to avoid their fate.

I have spent the last fourteen years of my life trying to understand the history of police torture in this city. How it happened. Why it happened. Whom it could happen to next. It is this last concern that connects you most viscerally to this history. And the reason I know this is from talking with your peers.

For example, one of your peers, a sixteen-year-old named Zach, told me that, just days before our interview, he had met a man who had been wrongfully convicted of a crime. The man said he was convicted because "he got tortured into copping a plea." He had been locked up for twenty years, Zach explained, and got out in 2013.

Zach said that when he read the consent form to participate in my study, which mentioned the Chicago police torture cases, he kept thinking, "Is that what that man was talking about when he said he got tortured?" Then, Zach said he was going to ask me a question that he didn't want to ask the tortured man: "If something like that happens to you, how do you survive?"

I still haven't figured out an adequate response.

When one of your peers would ask me about the likelihood that they would be tortured someday, my stomach would ball into a knot and I would grow stiff. I would open my mouth, but no words would come out. It didn't occur to me at the time to tell them that young people who once attended some of the same schools as them had recently traveled to the United Nations to protest police violence. In hindsight, I think that would've provided some reassurance and tamped down some of their fears. The only thing I could ever think of to do was to talk about the political fight for reparations — the struggle that would bring the history of police torture to their classrooms.

I would like to share that history with you.

In the spring of 2014, the City of Chicago's Finance Committee held a hearing during which politicians considered a piece of legislation, officially called the 2015 Reparations Ordinance. This law was filed on behalf of fifty-seven survivors of police torture and included a number of demands, such as a public apology from the city and a monument to be built to honor the torture survivors. The survivors also filed for a monetary settlement to finance the Chicago Police Torture Reparations Commission and additional funding to pay for health care (including psychological counseling), free tuition at the City Colleges, and job training and placement for survivors and their families. On May 6, 2015, the Chicago City Council agreed to many of these demands, including $5.5 million in reparations for the survivors.

Although this dollar amount is not the largest ever awarded to victims of police violence, the ruling was landmark in the way it framed the issue. Although certain previous settlements did acknowledge that a person was tortured, that acknowledgment always hinged on whether someone had committed a crime. To win a judgment, a person had to prove not only that he or she was tortured but also that the victim was innocent of the crime he or she had confessed to. By contrast, the fifty-seven Black men who were awarded reparations from the City of Chicago were never exonerated of the crimes that they were convicted of. They were compensated for their torture, in other words, not for time they had wrongfully spent in jail.

In this sense, the Reparations Ordinance separated the legal notion of guilt from the issue of torture. This is what made the ordinance unique: it was a concession on the part of the City of Chicago that torture was wrong no matter what, regardless of whether the suspect was innocent or guilty. That concession was unprecedented. Because of the intergenerational, interracial movement that arose to fight for this cause, African American men who were tortured received reparations for the first time in US history.

You may be thinking that there is an obvious connection between reparations for slavery and for the Chicago torture cases. If so, you would be right. In 2014, Ta-Nehisi Coates brought renewed attention to the issue with his Atlantic article "The Case for Reparations," in which he argued that the United States should "atone" for stealing Black labor and wealth from African Americans and that, if the country did so, it would be very different from what it is today. While it is yet to be determined whether the torture cases in Chicago will have any bearing on the larger reparations debate, the kind of repayment that torture survivors won makes everyone see the legacy of racism and violence in the United States, as well as the impact of that legacy on police, health care, and education.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from The Torture Letters by Laurence Ralph. Copyright © 2019 Laurence Ralph. Excerpted by permission of The University of Chicago Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

Dettagli dell'edizione

• Editore: University of Chicago Press
• Data di pubblicazione: 2020
• Lingua: Inglese
• ISBN 10: 022665009X
• ISBN 13: 9780226650098
• Rilegatura: Copertina flessibile
• Numero di pagine: 266
• Contatto del produttore: non disponibile
• Persona responsabile: non disponibile