Chicago Police Torture Machine

Racist Cops Let Off

CHICAGO—A national and international spotlight was turned on the Chicago police with the July 19 release of a special prosecutor’s report on beating and torture complaints against the Violent Crimes Unit commanded by former Lieutenant Jon Burge. The brutality meted out under Burge, who was the Violent Crimes commander for police Area Two and Commander for Area Three, was also described in a May report of the UN Committee on Torture. From 1973 to 1991, Burge and his henchmen extracted “confessions” from black “suspects” on Chicago’s South Side through gruesome methods of torture, all with the complicity of the city’s Democratic Party machine and top cop brass. What happened under Burge’s command brings to mind the U.S. military’s sadistic abuse of prisoners at Abu Ghraib in Iraq.

The City has been forced to acknowledge some instances of wrongdoing while covering up the far-reaching web of those involved. Burge was fired in 1993 at age 46, keeping his pension, which he enjoys to this day. But despite testimony that nearly 200 “suspects” were brutalized and tortured, the special prosecutors decided not to prosecute a single cop, claiming that the statute of limitations had run out and that only three cases could be proven anyway. Dozens of Burge’s victims remain in prison, some for life, based on “confessions” extracted through torture methods. Among them are several men who had been sentenced to death. The prospect of executing them was a key factor in the decision by Illinois’ then-Governor George Ryan to impose a statewide moratorium on executions in 2000, leading to the commutations of all death sentences in 2003.

Burge’s Violent Crimes Unit is not unique in its wanton brutality. Look at New York City, where depraved cops tortured Abner Louima; or Philadelphia with its notorious police frame-up machine that has railroaded hundreds to prison, including death row political prisoner Mumia Abu-Jamal; or Los Angeles, where the Ramparts Division became synonymous with cop violence. The police, along with the army and the courts, are the core of the state apparatus that exists to enforce the property rights and class rule of the capitalists. And in the U.S., where black oppression is embedded in the capitalist system, it is black people who face the brunt of the cops’ daily regimen of brutality. On any given day in his life, a black man in America may wind up in jail, in the hospital or in the morgue after a run-in with the police. Just ask 14-year-old Cabrini Green resident Ellis Woodland, who was shot by the Chicago cops on August 7 and is still in critical condition.

Burge is not some “rogue” cop. He is a true product of the American way. As an MP during the Vietnam War, Burge learned torture techniques that he later “refined” on black Chicago. A former cop under Burge’s command testified that interrogations were referred to as the “Vietnam Special.”

The cops’ brutal interrogations became public knowledge at the time of a 1989 trial over a lawsuit filed by Andrew Wilson, who testified to the abuse he suffered at the hands of Burge, John Yucaitis and Patrick O’Hara. Wilson was beaten bloody, nearly suffocated from a plastic bag placed over his head, burned with a cigarette, given electric shock treatment through alligator clips attached to his nostril and ears and handcuffed against a scalding radiator. Then Burge put a gun in Wilson’s mouth and told him that if he confessed he wouldn’t be subjected to electric shock again.

Wilson’s ordeal came on the heels of the fatal shooting of two cops in 1982. A five-day manhunt, directed by Burge, turned a Chicago South Side community into a virtual war zone. Cops conducted house-to-house searches, kicking down doors and holding occupants, including children, at gunpoint. Black males were treated as suspects whether they matched the shooter’s description or not. Even one detective felt compelled to remark, “It was a reign of terror. I don’t know what Kristallnacht was like, but this was probably close” (“Deaf to the Screams,” Chicago Reader, 1 August 2003). It was only after Wilson courageously filed his suit that other victims of Burge & Co. in Area Two came forward with remarkably similar accounts of electrical torture targeting the genitals, suffocation, beatings, burns and Russian roulette.

Responsibility for the cops’ reign of terror lies squarely with the Democratic Party, which has ruled Segregation City on behalf of the capitalists for the better part of a century. Mayor Richard Daley, who served as Cook County State’s Attorney in the 1980s, knew about it, as did his assistant Dick Devine and all the top brass. Chicago’s first black mayor, Harold Washington, was no less complicit. Following an outcry over the five-day cop siege on the South Side and other police atrocities, Washington campaigned in 1983 on a “progressive” platform demanding that then-Police Superintendent Richard Brzeczek be fired. Yet it was a Washington appointee, Police Superintendent Fred Rice, who gave Burge a double promotion after the Andrew Wilson allegations surfaced. The prosecutors who are now doing damage control for Daley are more cogs in the same Democratic Party machine. Special prosecutor Edward Egan has a nephew who not only worked under Burge’s command but was the arresting officer of one of the torture victims. Egan’s assistant, Robert Boyle, was in the State’s Attorney’s office in 1969 when it worked with the Feds to assassinate Black Panther Party leaders Fred Hampton and Mark Clark.

Only in 2002 did a Cook County judge mandate an investigation into the Violent Crimes Unit. But prosecuting the cops was never the court’s intention. The intent was to paint the abuse as an aberration—the work of a few “bad apples”—in order to refurbish the credentials of the police. At the time of public police department hearings over the Andrew Wilson case, we warned in “Torture Town Chicago” (WV No. 547, 20 March 1992):

“Burge and his minions deserve to be locked in hell. But don’t hold your breath waiting for justice from the racist Democrats who run Chicago, or from the capitalist courts which have already shot down a civil suit brought by Andrew Wilson. Nor can the cops be tamed by police review board or other bandaid reforms. The ruling class will allow no real restraints on the armed thugs who defend their profit system.”

In contrast to this Marxist understanding, the reformist International Socialist Organization (ISO) and its front group, Campaign to End the Death Penalty (CEDP), have repeatedly fostered the illusion that the courts can deliver justice for the victims of police terror. In 2002, the ISO’s Socialist Worker (3 May 2002) hailed as an “important victory” the court order for an investigation. A few months ago, Socialist Worker (26 May) gushed that the cops’ victims had won another “victory” when the court ruled that the special prosecutors could release their findings. Now Socialist Worker (28 July) bemoans how these findings amount to “whitewashing police torture”—which is precisely what such “investigations” are designed to do. The CEDP has also cravenly called for “new trials for torture victims.” So the ISO would give the state another chance to frame up these men, this time with an appearance of legitimacy? We say: Free them now!

It is vitally important that the social power of labor be mobilized in struggle against rampant police brutality and racist attacks. Such struggle must be infused with the understanding that there will be no end to cop terror short of the destruction of the system of capitalist exploitation and racist oppression that the police “serve and protect.” We seek to forge a Leninist vanguard party that will lead all of the exploited and oppressed in the fight for socialist revolution—the only road to sweeping away the capitalist state and its frame-up machinery.