The Torture Letters: Reckoning with Police Violence

The Torture Letters

The Torture Letters

Reckoning with Police Violence

LAURENCE RALPH

The University of Chicago Press

Chicago and London

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637

The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London

© 2020 by Laurence Ralph

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations in critical articles and reviews. For more information, contact the University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th St., Chicago, IL 60637.

Published 2020

Printed in the United States of America

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ISBN-13: 978-0-226-49053-3 (cloth)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-65009-8 (paper)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-72980-0 (e-book)

DOI: https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226729800.001.0001

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Ralph, Laurence, author.

Title: The torture letters : reckoning with police violence / Laurence Ralph.

Description: Chicago ; London : The University of Chicago Press, 2020. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2019005353 | ISBN 9780226490533 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780226650098 (pbk : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780226729800 (e-book)

Subjects: LCSH: Police brutality—Illinois—Chicago. | African Americans—Violence against—United States. | Torture—United States.

Classification: LCC HV8148.C52 R35 2019 | DDC 363.25/4—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019005353

This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

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

Acknowledgments

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Southern trees bear strange fruit

Blood on the leaves and blood at the root

Black bodies swinging in the southern breeze

Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees

WRITTEN BY ABEL MEERPOOL (1937),

SUNG BY BILLIE HOLIDAY (1939)

Once the classic method of lynching was the rope.

Now it is the policeman’s bullet.

WILLIAM PATTERSON, CIVIL RIGHTS CONGRESS (1951)

Prologue:

A Half Century of Torture

Here are the facts: between 1972 and 1991, approximately 125 African American suspects were tortured by police officers in Chicago.¹ The means of torture were numerous, but they all were conducted at Chicago’s Area 2 detective headquarters, which used to be located at 91st Street and Cottage Grove Avenue.² Beyond these verified instances, in 2003 journalists documented other episodes of torture before and after these dates, and elsewhere in the city, placing the total number of survivors of police torture in Chicago at roughly two hundred.

The numbers themselves are astounding enough, but they offer only the surface of this horror. Even now, after researching the topic of police torture for fourteen years, the reality is hard to grasp but impossible to doubt: For almost a half century, over and over and over again, police officers who took an oath to protect and serve the residents of Chicago have instead done the opposite. They have beaten residents of Chicago. They have electrocuted residents of Chicago. They have tied residents of Chicago to radiators and left them there for hours. They have suffocated them with typewriter covers and plastic bags. They have raped them.

The scope of the problem is so vast that, after decades of denial and avoidance, in 2009, the state government created the Illinois Torture Inquiry and Relief Commission. Although it was founded in the hopes of bringing to a close this aspect of Chicago’s past, the commission has done the opposite. Today it investigates the claims of anyone in Chicago convicted by confessions allegedly coerced through torture. So far, more than four hundred cases are pending investigation. But the commission has the resources to investigate only sixteen cases per year. At this rate, Duaa Eldeib, of the Chicago Tribune, calculated in October 2016 that the Commission would need more than 23 years to make it through the cases currently before them.³ That figure does not take into account the three to five new torture claims the commission still receives each week.

•••

Despite the ongoing nature of the problem, this book takes the criminal suspects who were systematically subject to sadism in the 1980s and 1990s as its point of departure. They ignited what is widely known today as the Chicago police torture scandal. With some rare exceptions, all the torture survivors were men, and Black men in particular.⁴ Overwhelming evidence suggests that multiple generations of police have systematically targeted Black men, making this the story not just of police brutality but also—as excessive policing so often is—of institutional racism. The reality of institutional racism and the circumstances that led to police torture all those years ago remain largely unchanged. As a result, police torture is very much an ongoing problem, as relevant today as it was when the first allegations of torture surfaced in 1982, prompting lawyers to dig deeper and find out that systematic torture in Chicago’s precincts had begun at least a decade earlier.

As we’ll see, police torture in Chicago is built on a contradiction: the existence of torture is, of course, a secret, and yet it is a secret that everyone seems to know about. Thus, we can understand police torture—and hope to change the circumstances that allowed it to happen—only if we understand it as the open secret that it is.

It goes beyond just the police department, said Flint Taylor, the lawyer who has tried many of the police torture cases in Chicago. When I interviewed him in the summer of 2017, Taylor said that the open secret extends to judges as well, because many of them were former prosecutors who worked hand in glove with the cops for convictions. They were in those station houses when the confessions were being taken, Taylor said. What’s more, some of the prosecutors were former police officers themselves. There’s a web that starts with suspected criminals on the streets and it ends with some of the most powerful people in the city, Taylor said. He uttered these words at the end of an hour-long conversation in which he described the complex network that connected cops to judges to prosecutors to politicians. That web, he said, is a major roadblock to the truth in these cases.

I have spent more than a decade trying to figure out what this truth consists of. What is police torture? Why do certain officers commit horrific acts in the name of justice? And what can we do about it? In pursuit of the truth about police torture, this book explores the web that Taylor describes. I show that many people who work for the city of Chicago—whether serving on the police force, or in the legal system, or in the city and state government—have chosen to remain silent about torture because of this delicate tangle of connections. They have wanted to avoid risking their careers, their safety, and, in some cases, their lives. Those who stayed quiet also became masters at looking the other way.

The open secret is what people in power know but refuse to say about police torture. And it is why in writing this book, I have often felt discouraged. If justice had been denied torture survivors for so many decades, if so many powerful people were in on the secret, I have often worried that nothing I wrote would be meaningful. Eventually, I came to understand that the true goal of my research was less about exposing police torture than investigating the openness of the secret. Why have so many powerful and influential people in Chicago been unwilling to publicly acknowledge acts of extrajudicial police force such as torture?⁵

Torture is a practice that people in power have long done against the other—and that other has been defined in various ways throughout US history. For most of US history, Black people have been the most obvious other in what Michelle Alexander has called a racial caste system. Within this system, those at the bottom tend to be Black, and they are the farthest away from the privileges and protections that the country gives to the white people at the top. Because Blacks, brought to this country as enslaved people, have occupied the lower rung of this social order for so long, torture has always been an essential element of the African American experience. This is why racial violence is another major focus of this book. The open secret of police torture reveals important lessons about the relationship between torture and racism in this country.

In The Condemnation of Blackness, for instance, historian Khalil Gibran Muhammad notes that, since the 1600s, and the dawn of American slavery, Black people have been viewed as potential criminal threats to US society.⁶ As enslaved people were considered legal property, to run away was, by definition, a criminal act. From there, it wasn’t much of a leap to link Blackness to criminality. Unlike other racial, religious, or ethnic groups, whose crime rates were commonly attributed to social conditions and structures, Black people were (and are) considered inherently prone to criminality. For many years, this link was thought to be biological; now, it is considered a cultural eventuality. But however one explains the link, Muhammad argues that equating Blackness and criminality is part of America’s cultural DNA.

The tendency of white Americans to view Blacks as criminals helps us better understand the phenomenon of police torture. To paraphrase one police officer discussing the Black people he arrested on suspicion of crimes, even if the suspects had done nothing wrong at that particular time, you could be sure that they either had done something for which they should have been arrested in the past or would do something wrong in the future. They were always guilty of some crime because they were Black.⁷

If these assumptions are encoded in our cultural DNA, as Muhammad suggests—and I agree with him—then the City of Chicago’s preferred method of dealing with police torture (i.e., compensating torture survivors with million-dollar payouts) will not solve the problem of police violence.⁸ At the very least, addressing this concern will require a willingness to interrogate why this country’s commitment to the principle that a person is innocent until proven guilty, one of the fundamental ideals of the US justice system, has never been fully extended to Blacks. Chicago is my case study to explore a broader national and transnational problem that should concern us all. This global concern is that, as agents of the state, police officers and military personnel kill and debilitate vulnerable people in ways that are systematic and thus predictable. And yet, precisely because they are agents of the state, they rarely face repercussions for the crimes they commit and the generational trauma they inflict.⁹

The history of Chicago police torture that I tell begins with the Black men who were suffocated and shocked and violated and humiliated at Area 2. Sometimes the officers at Area 2 tortured suspects after they confessed to crimes as a form of punishment. Other times, they tortured them to elicit a confession, as happened to Andrew Wilson, who became the first person to file a civil suit against the City of Chicago for the crime of torture. These men endured beatings, baggings (in which police officers suffocate criminal suspects with plastic bags), and sometimes much worse.

Many of these torture survivors were eventually exonerated. Some received monetary settlements as recompense for their torture and confinement. But their exoneration should not reaffirm our faith in the law—quite the contrary. Instead, we might wonder how many others have been wrongly imprisoned because of confessions extracted by torture. How many will never achieve the redemption that a few lucky exceptions did?

Judge Joan Lefkow, who presided over the trial of the disgraced and recently deceased police commander Jon Burge, one of Chicago’s most infamous torturers, argued that when a confession is coerced, the truth of the confession is called into question. When this becomes widespread, as one can infer from the accounts that have been presented here in this court, the administration of justice is undermined irreparably.¹⁰ But how can torture undermine the basis of the legal system when this system has always allowed police officers to kill and torture vulnerable people without sanction?

Of course, the vulnerable populations that are susceptible to torture are not exclusively Black. Even though race is a favored way of establishing the other in the United States, in recent decades religion has been another prominent way of creating a threat that is necessary to justify torture, particularly after the war on terror.

In the winter of 2016, while I was in the throes of this research project, Donald Trump, the forty-fifth president of the United States, clarified his position on torture. He did so during his first interview after being elected. Speaking of the group known as the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS), Trump said: When they’re shooting—when they’re chopping off the heads of our people and other people, when they’re chopping off the heads of people because they happen to be a Christian in the Middle East, when ISIS is doing things that nobody has ever heard of since medieval times, would I feel strongly about waterboarding? As far as I’m concerned, we have to fight fire with fire.

Trump followed this comment with the claim that he had recently spoken . . . with people at the highest level of intelligence, by which, I assume, he meant high-ranking US military officials. According to Trump, these military officials told him that techniques of torture, such as waterboarding, do, in fact, work.

Trump’s statements on torture may strike us as banal, especially given the sheer exhaustion of the twenty-four-hour news cycle in the United States. We have become so used to this president making one racist, Islamophobic, and otherwise-xenophobic statement after another that his comments on torture may barely even register. But it is important to realize that the idea of torture as a necessary evil in an increasingly dangerous world is consistent with George W. Bush’s CIA torture program, and even with the way Muslims were targeted for detention and unjustly detained at black sites like Guantánamo Bay during Barack Obama’s time in office.

The recent history of torture during the war on terror tells us a great deal about what this country views as a threat, who our society fears, and how much society is willing to compromise its ideals to defend itself against that threat. Being considered the enemy, and then being purposefully tormented because of that—this is what connects all the survivors of torture in my book, from the Black Chicagoans I discuss to a Guantánamo detainee named Mohamedou Ould Slahi.

Slahi’s interrogators stripped him, blindfolded him, and diapered him, before subjecting him to extreme isolation; physical, psychological, and sexual humiliation; death threats and threats to his family; and mock kidnapping and rendition, by which I am referring to the practice of sending terrorist suspects to countries that do not have any legal obligations to treat prisoners humanely. In a comparable way, we know that police officers in Chicago bagged a Black man named Andrew Wilson, beat him, and electrocuted him before torturing his brother, Jackie, who was arrested at the same time as he was. And yet it is not so much these techniques of torture that I focus on in this book. It is the justification by police, politicians, and the courts that rationalizes their use.

Time and time again over the course of this book, as police or military officers torture suspects, their racist and Islamophobic assumptions about suspects become self-fulfilling prophecy. Torture produces tainted knowledge that confirms a police or military officer’s contempt not just for the criminal but also for the social group to which the supposed criminal belongs. Slahi might seem a strange person to include in a book about torture committed against Black people in Chicago. But as we will see, the torture of a suspected drug dealer in the Midwest is intimately linked to the torture of a suspected terrorist half a world away.

The central themes of this book are twofold: torture persists in Chicago because of the complicity of people in power, and it persists in the United States because of our history of violence against populations we perceive as threatening to us. These twinned ideas come together in the image of the torture tree.

In this book, the torture tree references the words Billie Holiday crooned, painfully and deliberately, in Strange Fruit, a song recorded in the same year that Germany united with the Soviet Union to invade Poland, igniting a world war. Of the Black bodies swinging in the southern breeze, she sang:

Here is fruit for the crows to pluck

For the rain to gather, for the wind to suck

For the sun to rot, for the trees to drop

Here is a strange and bitter crop

In this song, the dead Black bodies swaying in the wind seem strange when compared to what a healthy tree would sprout. Holiday tells us that soil fertilized with racism and hate naturally yields a rotten and bitter harvest. Of course, lynching can be distinguished from torture by the fact that the practice was often perpetrated by vigilante figures or angry mobs who took the law into their own hands when they strung up and hung Black people from trees. By contrast, the severe pain and suffering that defines torture—well, at least by the United Nations definition that I subscribe to in this book—must be inflicted by or with the consent of a public official, such as a police officer.¹¹ Still, aside from this important distinction, there are some equally significant similarities. Both lynching and torture are forms of extrajudicial violence that demonstrate the victim’s position within society’s racial caste system. And thus, whether in the Jim Crow South of the early 1900s or on the South Side of Chicago today, these violent practices of punishment attest to a contempt not merely for the crime a person is accused of committing but also for the criminal. In short, these practices manifest the racism that is still prevalent in US society.

The metaphor of the torture tree also helps me explain several significant themes related to the contempt and the assumed guilt of the supposed criminal. Later in this book, we will see how the torture tree is rooted in our country’s investment in fear—an investment that is political, financial, and psychological—which maintains the enduring racial caste system in the United States. Its trunk is the mistreatment, harassment, torture, and death that stems from the current system of law and order, a system that injures and kills Black people at disproportionate rates as compared to white Americans. Just follow the branches to find the police and military officers connected to the aforementioned spectrum of violence that too often starts at mistreatment and ends in death. And finally, through this analogy, I show how and why the torture tree’s leaves come to represent everyday acts of police violence.

To be clear, in describing the violence and suffering associated with this tree, I use the word torture carefully. In the field of African American studies, there is a huge debate about whether scholars should talk explicitly about this type of violence and pain. The danger is that such descriptions can titillate readers and contribute to what Karen Sánchez-Eppler calls the pornography of violence.¹² Even when these descriptions are used toward a greater good—as when slave abolitionists used them to demonstrate the horrors of a corrupt system—the way Black people are put on display can make their inferior state seem impossible to overcome. For some important thinkers, describing torture in vivid detail can do more harm than good.

Still, I have decided to describe torture in this book when appropriate. There are many reasons for this choice. First, the torture survivors whom I spoke with wanted the public to know that they were not just roughed up. They were not just mistreated. What happened to them was horrifying. The suffering they endured was something that no human should be made to experience. Second, that suffering was worsened by the fact that the rest of us didn’t see it. For so long—for decades, in fact—the details of their torture were not believed. Had they not testified about torture from the witness stand, under oath, the torture survivors might never have found one another. When these survivors described the particular instruments used on them, what they looked like, how they felt, what kind of marks they left on their flesh, they transformed the morbid details of torture into evidence. This evidence, in turn, made it possible for other torture survivors to say, I have been tortured too or The same thing happened to me.

Indeed, the specificity of detail—horrifying as that detail often is—has been crucial to revealing the extent of torture. Not only has court testimony allowed survivors to find one another; investigative journalists over the past two decades especially have used that testimony to slowly identify the branches of this tree. It was through detailed and specific descriptions that investigative journalists have been able to reveal the truth of police torture. After a long struggle, so has the Illinois judicial system and the Chicago city government. But even among those aware of Chicago’s decades-long scandal, there is almost no understanding of how deeply the roots are embedded in the institutions of government. Nor has there been a research study concerned with how Chicago residents are coping with the history and ongoing threat that the torture tree represents. That is, until now.

Research for The Torture Letters began in the spring of 2007, and it consisted, at first, of a single obsession. That obsession was poring over transcripts of police torture cases in Chicago. I created a list of anyone who had sued the City of Chicago on the basis of having been tortured, and I was determined to read about how they described torture in their own words. To come up with this list, I looked at old newspaper articles and cross-referenced the names there with reports on police torture that the city had released over the years, the oldest of which was the Goldston Report from 1990. I found that Black people in Chicago had been claiming that they had been tortured long before that report was published. They continued to make these claims in the late 2000s, when I started this research in earnest, and those claims continue until today.

But I did not draw my conclusions only from reports on torture and court testimony. Over the course of my research, I talked to lawyers such as Flint Taylor who have tried torture cases, I went to rallies and heard torture survivors speak about what they endured, and I interviewed activists who have worked to bring attention to the scandal of police torture. I amassed reams of files consisting of court proceedings and interviews I had conducted with lawyers, torture survivors, and activists. Still, I felt that the book was missing something. What it was missing, I eventually realized, was what everyday Chicagoans thought about this history of torture. Did the scandal of police torture relate to their everyday lives?

To answer this question, I organized group discussions (which I called focus groups) that consisted of eight to ten people as well as one-on-one interviews with Chicago residents. My criteria were that participants had to be interested in learning about the history of police torture (if they didn’t already know about it), and they had to be willing to share their own experiences with the police, whether good or bad, and even if those encounters seemed unremarkable to them. As it turned out, these criteria were broad enough to attract more than one hundred curious and engaged Chicagoans. They came from all parts of the city—from the South Side to the East Side, and from the North Side to the West Side. They ranged in age from fourteen to fifty-one years old. They were Black, white, Asian, and Latino.

Speaking with such a diverse group of Chicagoans has obvious benefits, but also some disadvantages. One reward is that I had access to multiple perspectives on a complex issue. As a researcher, I am always intrigued by the prospect that people’s interpretations can add nuance to the way I have been thinking about a given issue. And as a writer, I am also interested in listening to people voice their concerns. Doing so makes my work more accessible—something that’s always been important to me. But there is a significant downside to this approach. Having such a diverse group, with such different experiences, makes it hard to organize a group discussion. Once such an event is organized, it can easily go off the rails.

As a way to address this problem, I came up with an idea. I decided to use some of the material I came across during the course of doing research as starting points—icebreakers, if you will—to structure my focus groups. The first part of a typical focus group began with court testimony from a torture case. By sharing and discussing court testimony and statements from police officers who had knowledge of the scandal, I could usually tell what people already knew about police torture. I organized the next part of the focus-group discussion around a newspaper article that described how criminal suspects were systematically tormented while in police custody. I found that such media reports typically prompted people to discuss how victims of police violence were portrayed, and whether or not they agreed with that portrayal. Finally, I ended the focus groups by sharing one of two letters I had written, which discussed how I became aware of the phenomena of police torture. One draft open letter was to Black youth in Chicago, and the other was to the superintendent of the Chicago Police Department, Eddie Johnson. Both letters had the effect of eliciting discussion about who was responsible for inflicting pain on criminal suspects in the city.

I shared these letters for a particular reason: I wanted Chicago residents to get a sense of my perspective, my voice. Having facilitated these kinds of groups for previous research projects, I knew that most of the discussion would take place between the participants. I inserted myself into the conversation only when the discussion had stalled, or to change topics, or to keep track of time. But I wanted to create space to test my own assumptions about how I was thinking about the