"A Trail of Coerced Confessions"

[Content Note: Police brutality; racism; torture.]


Above: A perfect, incisive response from Prison Culture (shared with her permission) to a line from this important and must-read story by Spencer Ackerman for the Guardian on Richard Zuley, a former detective with the Chicago Police Department, and his individual role in the systemic railroading of poor, black suspects by Chicago law enforcement.

Allegations stemming from interviews and court documents suggest a kind of beta test in the ugly history of Chicago police abuse – which has robbed black and poor Americans of their health and freedom and still costs taxpayers millions in civil-rights payouts – for both the worst excesses of torture in the war on terrorism and a trail of convictions based on dubious confessions born of brutality.

It is unclear how many cases Zuley investigated. Rob Warden, who founded Northwestern University's Center on Wrongful Convictions, said he had never heard of Zuley. But based on patterns from other Chicago police investigators, he said, the number of people Zuley put in prison likely "runs well into the double digits, perhaps the triple digits."

...But Chicago has a longstanding history of police abuse, much of it racialized.

"There have been a number of really bad apples in the Chicago police department who unquestionably have railroaded unknown numbers of innocent people into prison," Warden said.

Police tactics of the sort Zuley used stretch back decades. They have left generations of scars across Chicago's black residents.

"Having fought against police torture and abuse in the courts here in Chicago for more than 45 years," said local civil-rights lawyer Flint Taylor, "I have reached the inescapable conclusion that Chicago police violence is systemic, fundamentally racist, and disproportionately impacts the poor and communities of color."

Please read the whole thing.

And, if you are interested in finding out more about the work being done in Chicago seeking justice and accountability for the communities targeted and terrorized by Chicago law enforcement, I highly recommend following We Charge Genocide and Prison Culture.