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John Conroy: You might say it was an accident. An editor at Alfred A. Knopf, horrified by the practice of torture, wanted to do a book on it and asked if I would be interested. I wanted to work with her and Knopf, so I said yes, though I feared I might end up with a noble book that no one would read. While I was looking for some case studies to provide the plot drive, a friend called and told me that a cop killer named Andrew Wilson alleged he'd been tortured in a Chicago police station seven years earlier, and that he had a civil suit pending. I walked in the courtroom on the first day of trial, not expecting much. Wilson was an inarticulate witness, he had a history of gun crimes, and he was clearly guilty of the murders of Officers Richard Fahey and William O'Brien. Furthermore, he was up against some likeable, seemingly honorable policemen who were very good on the witness stand. But the medical evidence—the burns on his chest, the scabs from alligator clips placed on his ears to administer electric shock—was impossible to discount.
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What started as an apparently minor civil case involving Wilson eventually evolved into the discovery of a widespread, decades-long program of torture in Chicago. Why the lack of interest in Wilson's case?"I didn't feel threatened because there was no response."
He'd killed two cops. Nobody had any sympathy for him. Furthermore, there was a trial of a sports agent going on at the same time and various celebrities were flying in to testify. The daily reporters had to cover the whole building, not just the Wilson case, so they were understandably distracted and missed the significance of some of the testimony and argument. As it turned out, Wilson had the most compelling medical evidence of any of the other victims—torture, properly administered, leaves no physical marks. So the case against the police department, even when a more sympathetic victim could be portrayed, always came back to the African American who'd killed two Irish American cops. To stand up for somebody you thought might be innocent meant you had to stand up for somebody who was certainly guilty of a heinous crime.It was a test: Are we against torture? Or do we object only to the torture of people we like?When you started digging into the practices of Burge and others, what was the response from the Chicago Police Department? City politicians? Did you feel threatened when exposing what became a major story about the unthinkable abuse of police power?
I didn't feel threatened because there was no response. The Reader received four letters concerning my first article. Two were in favor of the torture and two were opposed. None of them were from any city or county official. Nobody who wrote mentioned that he or she was a police officer. The story, which I thought could rock the city, came and went without a whimper from the CPD, from politicians, from prosecutors, and nearly everyone else.
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During that incident I never felt there was any grudge on the part of the officers I came in contact with. Some were more helpful than I ever could have expected. There was a lot of response to the article I did about the mugging (far, far more than the response to anything I'd written about the torture of African Americans in Chicago), but no officer or state's attorney wrote in and said, "Delighted that he got whacked. Wish I'd been there to see it," or anything even vaguely of that nature.Were there officers who held a grudge? I can't help but think so. I'd have held a grudge if I were working for CPD at the time. I was, in essence, standing up for the rights of a guy who'd killed two cops as well as other men who were guilty of murder and other crimes. But aside from an email that said, "You are scum," which could have come from anyone, and an anonymous letter from someone who blamed me for the suicide of a detective I'd never written about in connection with the torture, I've never received anything that resembled a threat.As for officers I knew, most of them weren't the type to support that kind of egregious misconduct, so my reporting probably improved our relationships.
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One of the things that blew the case against Burge open—and helped to support the work of his attorney Flint Taylor and others—were the anonymous letters sent in Chicago Police Department envelopes about other incarcerated men with their own torture stories. Did you ever make any headway as to who was penning those letters?"For a teacher, it will be tempting to keep it simple: A few bad apples in the police department ran amuck for decades. It will be much more difficult to get across that it wasn't just the individual officers who sinned. Every system failed here."
No. It remains one of the great mysteries of the long saga. They clearly came from someone who knew the ins and outs of Area 2 [the police station where the torture took place]. He or she provided a list of those who went along with the torture ("Burge's Asskickers") and those who were opposed ("Weak Links"). The letters contained some misspellings that seem to suggest the sender went to a bad public school. Figuring that an African American officer was more likely to fall into that category, I once thought the letters might have come from one of the black detectives who worked under Burge. (Various African American detectives at Area 2 had complained about Burge over the years.) But I once showed the letters to a former high ranking CPD officer and he suggested that the writer was white, pretending to be someone who might be African American, because he spelled some difficult names and words correctly but failed on some easier ones.
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Ideally there would be some visceral experience that could be imposed without harming the students, which would suggest what they might face if they end up in an interrogation room with officers who work for a department that has failed to discipline abusive cops for decades.I'd also suggest that students study the inactive bystander phenomenon—why good people fail to act during emergencies. And at the very least teachers should drill home the lesson that "Sign here and you can go home," really means, "Sign here and you won't see home for maybe the next 20 years."How can students be made aware of the full breadth of the wrongdoing?
It will be a challenge because responsibility for what happened must be shared by so many different actors and agencies. For a teacher, it will be tempting to keep it simple: A few bad apples in the police department ran amuck for decades. It will be much more difficult to get across that it wasn't just the individual officers who sinned. Every system failed here. Police supervisors failed. The Office of Professional Standards [the agency formerly responsible for investigating claims of police misconduct], largely failed. Certainly the Cook County State's Attorney's Office bears immense responsibility. That office knew that the torture had occurred as early as 1982, and as evidence mounted over the years, prosecutors did nothing, though innocent men on death row might have died as a result.
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He might be right. But what would you rather have, innocent people going to prison while the guilty remain on the street, free to commit more crimes, or a community, uninformed and complacent, happy to be relieved of perceived miscreants no matter how it is done?Why are students just now being taught about this?
If you're suggesting this should have been done years ago, you'll get no argument from me. I have long thought that there should be a theater troupe that tours high schools in underprivileged areas re-enacting interrogations, portraying the methods that have been used to extract confessions here. If it could be done with students playing the suspects being interrogated without causing them harm, that would be even better. The program could cease when the police department convinces the community that it has disciplined bad officers.
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Do you think that perhaps thanks to things like video footage and pressure from social media, like that in the case of the death of Walter Scott in South Carolina, we're being presented with facts about policing in America that were previously easy for authorities to deny?"On the day of publication, impact on society was really not on my mind. What I was thinking, I suspect, was more on the nature of, 'Should I get out of town for a while?'"
I really hesitate to generalize from a few videotaped incidents in a few communities spread across a vast nation. And if social media is such a powerful tool, why are people who were tortured, abused and coerced by the Chicago Police still imprisoned? Those men are not asking for new trials. All they are asking for is a hearing. Of course the reason why that's not an easy thing to grant is that the State's Attorney's Office fears that officers called to testify will take the Fifth rather than risk prosecution for perjury. Burge, after all, went to prison not for torture but for perjury and obstruction committed in some broad denials he'd made in a civil suit.It's the dream of every journalist, I think, to have an impact on society—a change in policy, a righting of wrongs, or educating the public of things hidden by those in power. Your stories about Jon Burge seem to have accomplished all of this. When you began working on the story, did any of that seem like a remote possibility?
I started on this story 26 years ago, and I worked on the first article for almost a year (the first Wilson v. Burge civil trial ended in a mistrial, so a second followed). I think dreams of impact were pretty submerged given how nervous I felt about what I was writing. You have to remember that the wrongful conviction movement was almost nonexistent—the first DNA exoneration in the United States occurred in August, 1989, while Wilson's trial was ongoing, and it involved a false rape accusation, not police misconduct. Back then, if the police said something, the overwhelming majority of people believed it to be true.
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You and Burge met in 1989. Can you tell us about the context of that meeting, how it came about, where it occurred, and what was discussed?"I think the vast majority of officers are straight arrows trying to do a difficult job. But I think the department still tolerates abuse and still supports abusive officers."
We met during the trial. There was a lot of sitting around outside the courtroom, and after a while the accused officers knew who I was and were somewhat comfortable in my presence. I hadn't written anything, as I intended to file when the proceedings ended. When they were over, I asked Burge's attorney if I could interview him. The ground rules were that I wouldn't ask about the trial, as Wilson's attorneys were appealing the verdict. When I got to the station, Burge had invited a lieutenant to sit in, fearing I would put words in his mouth that he hadn't said. I offered instead to tape the interview and give him the cassette at the end of the interview, suggesting he could copy it and return it to me. He called his attorney, who said that was an even better solution, and so the interview proceeded with just the two of us in the room.
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We exchanged words—just a sentence or two—about his health during his criminal trial in 2010. Back in the 1990s, at a court hearing probably a couple of years after my first story came out, Burge asked me if I knew a certain woman who had been in the audience. I told him her name (she was the mother of one of the men who had alleged that he'd been tortured). He said something on the order of, "I thought so," and then told me that she had almost been indicted herself for trying to cover up the murder that her son had committed. He claimed she'd poured lime on the corpse.If I were to talk to him now, I'd probably ask about his health. Then I'd ask if we could do an interview. I'd be happy with any conditions he wanted to impose, including the release of what he had to say after his death. And if he didn't want to do that, I'd ask him what he thought about my journalism and what I've said about him in interviews.When you look at the Chicago Police Department now, do you have a sixth sense about how they operate, what their practices are and what they do behind closed doors? Are they as foul as they were back then?
I don't claim to have a sixth sense about anything. I think the vast majority of officers are straight arrows trying to do a difficult job. But I think the department still tolerates abuse and still supports abusive officers. And the Cook County State's Attorney is still happy to turn a blind eye to the abuse. That makes it tough for the straight arrows as well as the community.Last year, police Commander Glenn Evans, an African American, was actually indicted after a man named Rickey Williams claimed that the commander had shoved a gun deep down his throat while holding a TASER to his groin. It's highly likely that no charges would have been filed had Evans cleaned his gun properly, but it turned out that the Independent Police Review Authority, which has replaced the Office of Professional Standards, found Williams's DNA on Evans's gun.Commander Evans has a history of abuse charges, including a 2006 allegation that he choked and beat a city water worker who served a shut-off notice on Evans's house and a 2007 allegation that he put a TASER up Cordell Simmons's rectum. The Cordell Simmons case allegedly took place in the 6th District station, and other officers allegedly helped by pulling down Simmons's pants.So has the department changed?John Conroy now works as the director of investigations at the DePaul University School of Law's legal clinic. He is the author of a book on The Troubles, Belfast Diary, and another on torture, Unspeakable Acts, Ordinary People: The Dynamics of Torture. Conroy also authored a play about Burge and his torture program in Chicago called My Kind of Town.Justin Glawe is a freelance journalist based in Chicago who writes regularly for VICE and The Daily Beast. Follow him on Twitter.