CHAPTER 1: The Assault
As Matt got to his feet—his face, light blue shirt, and brown suede jacket soaked in his own blood—he pleaded with the officers to arrest our attackers, file a report, to look at the blood on our faces and help us get medical attention.After a short conversation, the officers politely ushered the two men who had just left us bloodied and concussed to their car.
CHAPTER 2: "Very Serious Accusations"
Jonathan, meanwhile, went home stitched and concussed to contemplate his plan of action and the list of serious questions suddenly thrust upon him. What would happen to his life if he decided to pursue a case against the police? Given the department's history of corruption and the degree of power it wielded, could he win such a case, and would the cops retaliate against him? If the media started taking an interest and his name were splashed all over TV and the internet, would that affect his future employment chances or romantic prospects? And he still had a lecture course to teach at the University of Chicago. As the hours and days went by, Jonathan decided, like Matt, to move forward. The words of one of his dissertation advisers proved influential: "If you don't pursue justice here, it will eat away at you forever."
That first week after the beating, we were talking on the front deck at Matt's place when a black SUV with tinted windows pulled up to the curb. The passenger-side windows were rolled down, revealing two open laptops on the dash and four plainclothes cops in bulletproof vests who leered at us stone-faced for a very, very long minute before the driver floored it down the street. It left us trembling, which we assumed was its intended purpose.
Our story is grim, but it's not unique. In the weeks after our assault, our injuries still fresh and visible, we encountered people who'd ask about our bruises and cuts. When we told them our story, a surprising number replied with personal and deeply troubling stories of their own about police-related violence they or those close to them had experienced. Our fear of Chicago's finest was all too common, our story tragically mundane.Our story got more attention than the vast majority of brutality cases, however, when our lawsuit against the city, our assailants, and the uniformed cops on the scene that night was filed on March 23, 2010.CBS was the first media outlet to contact our attorneys for an interview. NBC, ABC, FOX, and Univision followed, along with newspapers, radio stations, and websites of all sorts. We have to guess the attention came from us having a video of the assault and, perhaps more importantly, being white academic types instead of the minorities who are Chicago's typical victims of police brutality.
Until that winter we were in a daze of sorts, trusting that our lawyers and the system would eventually do right by us. But around the time of Jonathan's IPRA statement we both snapped awake and realized we needed to be completely engaged if we wanted justice—a concept that we were still naive enough to believe in at that point. A judge and jury would eventually hear us out, we assumed, and once that happened there would be no way for them not to be swayed by the facts, by the force of the evidence we already had and would continue to accumulate.Soon our every spare hour was spent reviewing legal documents and brainstorming on ways to ID our attackers. One night we came to the conclusion that we needed the public's help. IPRA and the cops weren't helping, but somebody out there might know something, and might be willing to aid us, if provided with the right incentive. Most victims of police violence don't have the financial means to offer that incentive, but we did, and we needed to do everything possible to enlist the public's support.Soon our every spare hour was spent reviewing legal documents and brainstorming on ways to ID our attackers.
When the day finally came, news vans lined the block around our attorneys' office; a couple of plainclothes detectives stared us down from their Crown Vic. We sat at a long table with our lawyers and faced the television cameras from all the major Chicago TV stations as we spoke about our case and our search for information. It was nerve-racking to put ourselves out there to the press and the city once again.While we were smart enough to know how to get our story out there, we had no clue how to control the spin.
CHAPTER 3: Grinding Through the Machine
Unsurprisingly, the case began to seep into our everyday lives. Jonathan was in Chicago for the summer, living in Hyde Park and teaching, and he began to study the history of policing and the sociology of police violence. The ordeal made him want to know more about the force we were dealing with, and he found himself drawn into an area of research that was intensely personal. If some upper-middle-class academics tended to talk about the power of the state on an intellectual level, Jonathan now understood, viscerally, what it meant when you found yourself on the wrong side of the power structure.Jonathan now understood, viscerally, what it meant when you found yourself on the wrong side of the power structure.
All this coincided with the three-year anniversary of our assault, and the beginning of the system's final and most effective push to silence us.Just weeks before we were supposed to go to trial in March 2013, the City of Chicago responded to our $185,000 settlement offer. Our attorneys said the government was worried about our proven ability to attract media attention. On the heels of several other high-profile police-violence cases, the people in charge didn't look forward to a spring of headlines about cops participating in an assault and abandoning two men who'd been beaten to a pulp in a parking lot. (In November 2012, a jury ruled against both the city and an individual off-duty cop in the 2007 beating of bartender Karolina Obrycka and she was awarded $850,000 in damages.)We scoffed at the city's attempted resurrection of the expired offer without hesitation. If they didn't want an ugly public courtroom brawl, well, we did. It was now the only opportunity we saw to affect any sort of change with Chicago Police and the system that supports their violence.Two days after we turned down the settlement, the federal judge delivered his summary judgment. Cases like ours go through two major hurdles before they ever see a courtroom with a jury in it. The first is defending against the city's "motion to dismiss," which happens very early on in the case. When we faced that challenge, we were shocked and elated with what the judge wrote in his November 17, 2010, denial of the motion:"It is plausible, based on the facts alleged in the amended complaint, that the Uniformed Officers discovered either before arriving or upon arriving at the scene that the Plainclothes Officers were police officers. It is not plausible that the Uniformed Officers would arrive at the scene of an altercation, proceed to participate with unknown private citizens in the beating of other private citizens, and then allow the private citizens to leave. Thus, based on the above, Plaintiffs have stated valid claims for failure to intervene, and we deny the motion to dismiss the claims for failure to intervene."The judge had described the scene in this first statement just as the video showed it. During the summary judgment stage—nearly two and a half years later in February 2013—in which a case can be decided in part or in full by the judge, he reversed his previous assessment, stating instead that: "It is undisputed that Individual Moving Defendants did not arrive on the scene until after the altercation between Plaintiffs and Plainclothes Officers had ended," a description that is clearly refuted by video evidence.With that sudden reversal, we watched our case crumble. This judge was now telling us the uniformed cops basically had done nothing wrong. If you're being beaten and bleeding, they don't need to get you medical help or file a report. Those points could never be revisited. Period. We only had the off-duty female officer left in the case—whom Jonathan had identified—and theMonell claims linked to her.We had lengthy conversations with our attorneys in which they relayed the city attorneys' threats to countersue the two of us personally for the city's legal fees if we were to lose the trial—which could amount to six to seven figures. Our attorneys had their own "financial considerations," telling us they would re-negotiate our representation agreement ahead of any appeal, and they would require heavy up-front fees for their efforts. If we kept fighting, there was a real chance we'd be left with nothing to show for it—no justice, no closure, just debt.We were forced to settle.In the end, we each got about $45,000. That's $45,000 after three-plus years of fear and suffering, $45,000 for injuries both physical and mental inflicted upon us by city servants. The uniformed cops, meanwhile, were never charged with anything. As far as we know, they're still cops. And we never found out the identity of our attackers; to this day the city and the police department have never admitted that they're cops.The city attorneys had one more insult for us, however. During our final interaction with them—the only time we were together in a courtroom—they insisted on including language in the settlement that would characterize the payment as taxable. While case law is clear in defining settlements in injury cases like ours as generally nontaxable, it is apparently routine for the city to insist otherwise. The opposing lawyers wouldn't budge, but their vindictiveness and pettiness was so obvious that the judge reprimanded the city: "So, you mean we're here because you're trying to force them to pay taxes on this settlement money? Get out of my court and adjust the language in the agreement." It was one of our few victories in our dealings with a completely broken system.If they didn't want an ugly public courtroom brawl, well, we did.
From the moment we walked into that parking lot four and a half years ago, the city machinery was set in motion to conceal the truth and make us go away. We don't mistake this settlement for fulfillment or cause for a celebration. Payouts like the one we got are empty victories and everyone close to us knew it was nothing more than the final insult we were forced to accept.We now recognize that the government's ability to silence victims is a skill that's been honed through years of experience. The decks are stacked—heavily—on the side of the police, who can create the official record of events through their reports. Coupled with their legal authority, this instills a powerful sense of fear in victims, who are often discouraged, as we were, to file complaints. Meanwhile, police accountability institutions, like IPRA, are often staffed by former cops who are hired and paid by the people who have every incentive to avoid lawsuits like ours. A slow official response makes it easy for the public to forget about incidents of police brutality, sluggish and ineffective complaint protocols make it difficult for incidents to become cases, and the common practice of essentially forcing people to take payouts makes it impossible for cases to effect change in the legal system.Even if a case makes it into court, the odds continue to be stacked against the victims of police brutality. This can be seen in the biases of judges and other decision makers in the justice system, or in the gross warping of normal legal processes, as we recently saw in Ferguson. The net effect is that it's virtually impossible to effect lasting change through the courts.Our case didn't result in any lasting legal change, either. But we had one final victory: We got the city to delete their usual full-gag-order contingency clause, which would have barred us from discussing the case publicly in any form with anyone. This has allowed us to speak out about what happened to us. It's allowed us to regain some dignity by staying vocal and trying to add to the ongoing dialogue about police violence and the broken justice system in this city and in the country. It's allowed us to write this piece, and share our story. We hope it helps, somehow. All we can hope is that the victims will continue to refuse to be silenced, that the system will change, and that what happened to us won't happen again.*After publication, one of the subjects asked that VICE remove his name from this article. We have therefore removed his full name from the piece.We now recognize that the government's ability to silence victims is a skill that's been honed through years of experience.