I was born, raised, and lived in Chicago for my first 47 years. I loved my city then, and I still love my city today, although I don’t live there anymore. But one thing that nobody who lived for a long time in Chicago, especially if you were there in the late 60’s, through the early 80’s never had any illusions about our cops.
They were as crooked as a corkscrew, and some of them were downright mean and abusive. The badge gave them carte blanch to do whatever they felt like. Not all of them of course, there were plenty of honest cops in Chicago. They worked in dispatch, in the crime lab, and walked beats in areas with a lot of graveyards in them. They had to, a few good cops could fuck it up for everybody else. The iconic Chicago columnist Mike Royko once reminisced about how one honest cop once became famous for going around the block of City Hall, ticketing all of the illegally parked limos of the politicians inside. He was transferred in a heartbeat to a gulag neighborhood.
This was not an aberration, and it was not a group of rogue cops. It was purposeful and systemic. In most large cities police chiefs, or superintendents or whatever all have their offices in police headquarters, in the middle of the action, and instantly available. Not in Chicago. The police superintendent had his office in City Hall, one floor below the Mayors office office, available for instant call.
The Chicago police department was not set up as a law enforcement agency. It was a de facto arm of the Democratic political machine in Chicago, and at that time Chicago had one of the most corrupt political machines since Tammany Hall. Fealty to the party came first, protecting the public was a distant second. African American districts were actually plum assignments. They were rife with prostitution in the backs of bars, illegal gambling and best of all the “policy wheel”, a homegrown black game that was a precursor to the lottery games of today. District cops shook them down weekly. The cop kept some, and turned the rest over to the sargent. He took his cut and turned the rest over to the precinct captain. He took his cut and the rest was passed up to the party. A cop pulling over a speeder would lean on the window and say “I have three pencils in my pocket that I sell. A $5 pencil, a $10 pencil and a $25 pencil. I think you need a $10 pencil, don’t you?”. Really discreet, huh?
Police protection in white neighborhoods was good. In Black and Hispanic neighborhoods, not so much. Mike Royko once wrote that there was “A big difference between Irish immigrants coming to Chicago, many who joined the police department the same day they got to town, and black men coming to Chicago, many of whom were locked up the same day they got to town”. Detectives regularly brought a suspect, usually a minority one into the station for questioning, put him in a room, tied him to a chair and repeatedly hit him over the head with the flat side of the Chicago phone book. This leaves no marks, but after a few minutes left the prisoner feeling as if his spine had been compressed into a 1” cube. The prisoner almost always ended up confessing to just about every open case file on the detectives docket, leaving them with a fine close rating.
By far and away the worst of the whole rotten lot was Commander Jon Birge. In the 1970’s he spent ten years running a “torture ring”, using methods like humiliation, verbal abuse, beatings and electric shocks to get confessions out of suspects. By the time the Fed’s got to him, the Statute of Limitations had long ago expired for most of his acts, they got him for perjury in his testimony before various grand juries and investigations about the abuse. Now, contrast that to the fate of one Anthony Holmes, an African American who spent 30 years in prison for being tortured into confessing to a murder he didn’t commit by Birge.
King Richard J. Daley ran the fiefdom of Chicago from 1955 until his death in his City Hall office in 1976. He was an unrestrained racist who knew how to cover it up publicly, but he saw no reason to keep his true feelings secret from his blue wall. As long as they left plausible deniability, all bets were off of the table. The unmitigated police riot of 1968 at the Democratic Convention was a nationally broadcast showing of everything that was the worst of the Daley police department.
Reforms have been tried, the most impressive one under the reign of King Daley himself. Following the Summerdale District scandal of 1959-60, when Richard Morrison, the “babbling burglar” told the tale of eight Chicago cops not only covering his burglaries, but backing their patrol cars up to have the trunks loaded up with booty, he could no longer avoid it. Something had to be done. That something was Professor Orlando Wilson, a highly respected criminal professor at Berkeley. He appointed Wilson as the Superintendent of police and Wilson immediately made significant changes. To quote the Wikipedia entry for Professor Wilson;
Reforms demanded at the outset by Wilson included establishment of a non-partisan police board to help govern the police force, a strict merit system for promotions within the department, an aggressive, nationwide recruiting drive for hiring new officers, and higher police salaries to attract professionally qualified officers.
For starters, Wilson moved the superintendent's office from City Hall to Police Headquarters and closed police districts and redrew their boundaries without regard to politics. Hiring standards were raised, graft curbed, and discipline tightened, with a new Police Board overseeing it. Wilson updated the communications system, adopted computers and improved record-keeping, bought new squad cars, and eliminated most foot patrols. Police boasted of quicker response times to citizen calls. Police morale, and the public image of the police, rose. Wilson also improved police relations with the black community. He recruited more African American officers, promoted black sergeants, and insisted on police restraint in racially charged conflicts.
King Daley absolutely fucking HATED Professor Wilson, but he was stuck with him. He had to make good on his promise of police autonomy, and besides, the public absolutely dearly loved Wilson. Privately he called Wilson every name in the book, and wished him a long, slow roasting in hell, but publicly he had to stand there smiling, his hand around Wilson’s shoulder and back every one of his reforms. The man was ruining his police department. Wilson retired in 1967 to return to California and spend more time with his family. Daley’s first act was to immediately move the Superintendent out of police headquarters and back to City Hall, one floor below him for easier supervision. His second act was to appoint a traditional, loyal party toady as the new police superintendent and to start undoing all of the harm that Orlando Wilson had wrought.
The police excesses we are seeing in Chicago today are nothing new. It breaks my heat to say this, but barring the brief Wilson interlude of 1960-1967, this violence and mindset is something that has been systemically baked onto the institution itself for over 50 years now. The tolerance for racially violent insensitivity by the police is not an aberration, it is the accepted practice of the department. Not among all officers to be sure! I honestly believe that the vast majority of the Chicago police department honestly want to do their job, to protect and serve the citizens of Chicago. But unfortunately, there is a baked in subculture where this kind of excessive violence and corruption is not only tolerated, it is accepted by the very system itself. The British used to have a phrase for the carnage in Northern Ireland, it was “an acceptable level of violence”. That is what we have here.
Let’s be clear. It took almost a half of a century to create and nurture this monster. The subculture of abusive officers like things just the way that they are, and the department and the City government are loathe to take the steps necessary to exorcise them for fear of shattering the department. And also, there’s the inevitable toxic fallout that would splash back onto them. It will literally take years of extreme reform, exhaustive changes to training and retraining of officers and constant supervision of not only local officials and civilian boards, but also from the U.S. Department of Justice to reform this department and make it what it should be. And the Justice Department will have to be unflagging to ensure that these changes are not only implemented, but actually take hold.
Until that happens, we will continue to see police violence from Chicago regularly on the news. And I will continue to be heartbroken over and ashamed of my great city.
Thanks as always for reading