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"I went to a reception last week with my mother," one of my patients tells me midway through a session.
"Oh really, what for?"
"My mother is a bit of a community activist, especially since my brother was incarcerated. He was one of the men who was tortured by the police. There's a new book coming out about it, The Torture Machine, and both of them are in there."
It is all too easy to forget the long, sorrowful legacy of torture committed by a group of policemen on Chicago's South Side. The brutality lasted decades, the fight for justice almost as long. One of the key lawyers for the victims, Flint Taylor, offers his own account in The Torture Machine: Racism and Police Violence in Chicago.
Jon Burge grew up on the Southeast Side of Chicago, and when he was drafted into Vietnam he was exposed to harsh interrogation techniques used by Americans against North Vietnamese prisoners of war. When he returned home to Chicago and became a police officer in 1970 he took such techniques with him. It only took two years for Burge to be promoted to detective and assigned to Area 2, where he would carry out brutal acts of torture against suspects.
From 1972 to 1991, it is estimated that Burge and his hand-selected "Midnight Crew" tortured at least 118 people, almost all of them black men. Taylor and his colleagues at the People's Law Office represented many of the victims in their quest for justice, and he is unsparing as he narrates the brutality imposed upon their bodies.
Burge was fired in 1993, but due to the statute of limitations he never faced justice for his crimes. When he was finally convicted in 2010, it was not for the abuse he meted out but for obstruction of justice and perjury due to the lies he told under oath in earlier suits. He was released from prison in 2014 and died last year in Florida. He never stopped receiving his pension from the city.
The actions of Burge and his associates cost the City of Chicago an estimated $132 million including both legal fees and settlements. In 2015, the City Council set aside $5.5 million dollars in reparations to surviving victims of torture. In addition to the settlement money, the agreement stipulated that victims and their families could receive free tuition at city colleges and job training programs, it opened the Chicago Torture Justice Center to provide needed services and education to survivors, and it established a curriculum to teach public school students about the sorry legacy.
Taylor's account is not just about a few bad apples in the Chicago Police Department. The idea that police officers were committing acts of torture against suspects in their custody was known to some at least as early as 1982. Andrew Wilson was arrested that year for the murder of two police officers and was subject to brutal torture methods. His injuries necessitated medical intervention, and one of the doctors who investigated him suspected that his injuries could only have been caused by officers during his interrogation. His suspicions were so strong that he sent a letter to the Chicago Police Superintendent which was then forwarded to the Cook County State's Attorney. The doctor noted the severity of Wilson's injuries and asked for an investigation into Burge and his team. The state's attorney took no action, and the existence of the letter would not be revealed until much later. The recipient of that letter was Richard M. Daley, the son of Richard J. Daley, who would become mayor in 1989 and continued to hold the office for the rest of Burge's tenure with the Chicago Police Department.
Many of Burge's victims could rightly be diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder, yet that only tells part of the story. When someone experiences a strong traumatic reaction to a car wreck, we rightly focus on doing what we can to ameliorate those symptoms. But what if we begin to notice that a number of people have had traumatic car accidents and they all seem to occur on roughly the same stretch of highway? We can and should do what we can to treat our patients' symptoms, but we would be remiss to not also ask what is going on with that stretch of highway that makes it so negative to the physical and mental health of those who travel upon it.
My patients experience something similar, but it is not just related to one trauma trigger. Gun violence, lack of mental health care, closing schools, long-neglected neighborhoods—all become a part of the traumatic "soup" in which far too many residents of Chicago and other major urban areas reside. Taylor's The Torture Machine is a sad but necessary reminder of how citizens can be victimized by those who are supposed to protect them and how that abuse can poison entire neighborhoods. But it is also a story of a hard-won hope that resulted in some degree of justice for victims and an effort to remind children of what once happened in the hope that it won't be repeated. The book is a chronicle of tenacity and hope alongside brutality and injustice, and in that way it is a profoundly Chicago story.
