Chicago pays reparations to 57 victims of torture by renegade police squad
Chicago announced Monday that it is paying $5.5 million in reparations to victims of a police unit that for decades systematically tortured African-Americans in detention, the Chicago Sun-Times reports.
The payments followed an agreement by the City Council last spring—just a week after sometimes-violent protests in Baltimore over the death of Freddie Gray, a black man in police custody—to be the first major city in the nation to pay such reparations, with the aspiration to give $100,000 checks to each torture victim. That effort to build public trust has been stymied more recently by events such as the release of the police dash-cam video of a white police officer killing 17-year-old Laquan McDonald, hitting him with 16 shots; and the police shooting of a 19-year-old black man that included the accidental police killing of his 55-year-old neighbor.
Those and other police actions are included in a federal civil rights investigation underway, and Mayor Rahm Emanuel said Monday that the city needs first to heal the decades-old wounds wrought by the police torture squad.
“Reparations is not a necessity,” Emanuel told the Sun-Times. “But it is a moral compunction and a moral reckoning to right a wrong. There is no statute of limitations on that.”
Emanuel, who has been widely criticized for his handling of the McDonald killing, noted that he was “not the mayor” during the long run of torture by the renegade police unit.
“To the context that we’re now in, it says that the city is willing to hold itself accountable and be responsible in fixing something and having the determination,” Emanuel said. “This could have been done by anybody over 30 years. It could have been done at the time. It could have been done in the ’90s. It could have been done in the first decade of the 21st century. In three years, we settled up legally, reparations and a verbal apology what hadn’t been done in three decades. It does indicate that I [am] willing to be accountable and willing to be held responsible for the city and have the determination, the desire and the diligence to get it done.”
Former Area 2 police commander Jon Burge was convicted in 2011 of lying under oath in civil suits concerning the torture, got time off for good behavior on his 4½ year sentence and recently was released from a halfway house in the Tampa, Florida area.
Burge headed up the “midnight crew” that tortured African-American suspects. Besides the recently authorized payments of $5.5 million to victims, the city has paid $100 million in Burge-era cases and legal expenses.
“To a lot of members of the African-American community, my sense is this is really a meaningful thing, says corporation counsel Stephen Patton. “Now, is this going to make up for Laquan McDonald? No. It’s not. But, in terms of resolving some of those wrongs and particularly egregious ones, yeah. I think it does.”
Lawyers for the torture victims, Flint Taylor and Joey Mogul, said Chicago’s “holistic model” approach should be a model for other cities, but that the significant dollar amounts for settlements have not ended the “long reign of police abuse.”
