If you’re looking to learn more about the history of police brutality in Chicago, then I highly recommend Andrew S. Baer’s new book Beyond the Usual Beating: The Jon Burge Police Torture Scandal and Social Movements for Police Accountability in Chicago.
Baer, who is an assistant professor of history at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, walks the reader through the rise, fall, and aftermath of the career of Jon Burge, a Chicago police officer who tortured people of color for confessions in the 1970s and 80s. Burge, and other officers working alongside him, hooked up suspects to electric wires and shocked them, wrapped plastic bags around their heads so that they couldn’t breathe, preformed mock executions—and more. Predictably, persons in Burge’s custody confessed to crimes they did not commit. When the story of the Chicago police torture scandal broke in the early 1990s, an already existing social movement for police accountability in Illinois gained momentum. Groups such as the People’s Law Office, Citizens Alert, Black People against Torture, and the journalism program at Northwestern University sustained the political pressure that eventually brought about the conviction of Jon Burge in 2010, an end to capital punishment in Illinois in 2011, and reparations for torture survivors in 2015. While Baer tells the story of a social movement against police oppression that achieved tangible results, he is quick to point out that the tale of Jon Burge is part and parcel of a larger narrative of “racist police violence” which started long before Burge’s career and is still ongoing.
The subject matter of Baer’s book doesn’t make for easy reading, emotionally. That said, his prose is engaging and accessible; the book is one of the most plainspoken academic monographs I’ve come across. Perhaps I’m a bit biased in favor of Baer’s work—I knew the guy in grad school, and we were in the same cohort. (Andy’s cool! Read his book!)
Today, at the funeral of George Floyd, Floyd’s niece asked “when has America ever been great?” It’s stories like that of Jon Burge that form part of the context of her question. Burge was a law enforcement officer who considered himself above the law. And according to Baer, the doings of Burge and his colleagues were an open secret among cops working on the South Side and among the higher-ups in City Hall downtown. When the Chicago PD finally fired Burge in the early 1990s, he still got a pension. Let’s be honest—in a truly great place, would stuff like this happen? Now don’t get me wrong: I think this country can change for the better. There are many people who want that change, and that is a good thing about the USA. It’s just that if American society is going to change, the national self-conception will have to become something to the effect of “it hasn’t been so great, but we’re working on it.” Books like Beyond the Usual Beating can help steer American identity toward more humility.