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Police Torture in Chicago
My current research project focuses on torture in the Chicago Police Department. It has been said that for two decades beginning in the early 1970s, Chicago was “the police torture capital of the United States.” It is now well documented that during the time, well over one hundred criminal suspects, the vast majority of whom were African-American, were tortured by Chicago Police officers, usually seeking to coerce confessions. This project examines the Chicago torture cases through the lens of Comparative Politics and International Relations research on government repression and human rights. On the one hand, I apply insights derived from global research to help explain the social and political dynamics of police torture in the US. On the other hand, I use insights from the Chicago cases to improve generalizable theories about repression and human rights in comparative and international scholarship. Specifically, this research project is guided by three overarching questions: First, how was a systemic pattern of torture able to persist for so long inside the Chicago Police Department? Scholars of government repression and human rights have identified a range of factors that have been found to help reduce violent abuses by government officials. These include the existence of accountability institutions such as independent courts, democratic elections, a free press, and a robust civil society. In Chicago, most of these conditions were present, yet for years they failed stem systemic torture. Their failure highlights the need for scholars to distinguish the factors that influence politically motivated abuse – meant to weaken political challengers and preserve political power – from those that influence non-political abuse – which targets marginalized individuals and communities who do not represent threats to existing power structures. In this project, I uses the Chicago torture cases to examine why the anti-repression mechanisms scholars emphasize are insufficient for combatting non-political government abuse and to identify the factors that sustain it. Second, what explains how and when official government actions to hold Chicago Police torturers accountable eventually did emerge? Community groups and activist lawyers in Chicago had been ringing the alarm over police torture for years, but government officials long resisted acknowledging or investigating abuses. Nevertheless, activists did eventually win some significant, albeit limited, victories, culminating in a 2015 city ordinance that, among other measures, paid financial reparations to some torture survivors. I examine these efforts for justice with an eye towards what they can teach us more generally about the politics of accountability for non-political government abuses. Third, what have been the impacts of the various government initiatives to deliver justice to torture survivors and their communities? In addition to the 2015 city ordinance, the state of Illinois also established a special commission, the Illinois Torture Inquiry and Relief Commission (TIRC), which provides individuals who were convicted of crimes based on tortured confessions an opportunity to challenge their convictions. I examine what kinds of “justice” these initiatives have – or have not – delivered. Much research examines the impacts of so-called “transitional justice” in places like South Africa and the former Yugoslavia, but such initiatives in wealthy, established democracies, like the United States, rarely get attention. The Chicago Police torture cases thus offer an opportunity to expand our understandings of the workings and impacts of transitional justice. The findings may also inform efforts in the United States to design more comprehensive initiatives to reckon with historical racial injustices . |
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