Laurence Ralph

Here are the facts: between 1972 and 1991, approximately 125 African American suspects were tortured by police officers in Chicago. The means of torture were numerous, but they all were conducted at Chicago’s Area 2 police precinct, which is located in the Pullman neighborhood but patrols much of the South Side. 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.

With some rare exceptions, all the torture survivors were men, and Black men in particular.

Police misconduct payouts related to incidents of excessive force have increased substantially since 2004. From 2004 to 2016, Chicago has paid out $662 million in police misconduct settlements, according to city records.

Furthermore, there is no reason to believe that these figures will decrease. Hundreds of Chicago Police Department misconduct lawsuit settlements were filed between 2011 and 2016, and they have cost Chicago taxpayers roughly $280 million. When I was writing this letter in July 2018, the city had paid more than $45 million in misconduct settlements thus far, in this year alone.

On July 5, 2018, Chicago youth of color staged a die-in at city hall to protest Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s plan to spend $95 million to build a cop academy. The young protestors set up cardboard tombstones with the names of people who had been killed by the police written on them with black ink. They also wrote the names of schools and facilities that had shuttered because of a lack of public funding.

Porch said that the police had handcuffed his arms behind his back and that one of the officers stood on his testicles. He said they hit him with a gun on his head. Then one of the officers tried to hang him by his handcuffs to a hook on the door.