The Torture Letters: Reckoning with Police Violence

By Laurence Ralph

Torture is an open secret in Chicago. Nobody in power wants to acknowledge this grim reality, but everyone knows it happens—and that the torturers are the police. Three to five new claims are submitted to the Torture Inquiry and Relief Commission of Illinois each week. Four hundred cases are currently pending investigation. Between 1972 and 1991, at least 125 black suspects were tortured by Chicago police officers working under former Police Commander Jon Burge. As the more recent revelations from the Homan Square “black site” show, that brutal period is far from a historical anomaly. For more than fifty years, police officers who took an oath to protect and serve have instead beaten, electrocuted, suffocated, and raped hundreds—perhaps thousands—of Chicago residents.
 
In The Torture Letters, Laurence Ralph chronicles the history of torture in Chicago, the burgeoning activist movement against police violence, and the American public’s complicity in perpetuating torture at home and abroad. Engaging with a long tradition of epistolary meditations on racism in the United States, from James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time to Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Between the World and Me, Ralph offers in this book a collection of open letters written to protesters, victims, students, and others. Through these moving, questing, enraged letters, Ralph bears witness to police violence that began in Burge’s Area Two and follows the city’s networks of torture to the global War on Terror. From Vietnam to Geneva to Guantanamo Bay—Ralph’s story extends as far as the legacy of American imperialism. Combining insights from fourteen years of research on torture with testimonies of victims of police violence, retired officers, lawyers, and protesters, this is a powerful indictment of police violence and a fierce challenge to all Americans to demand an end to the systems that support it.
 
With compassion and careful skill, Ralph uncovers the tangled connections among law enforcement, the political machine, and the courts in Chicago, amplifying the voices of torture victims who are still with us—and lending a voice to those long deceased.
 

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Release date: Jan 15, 2020
• ISBN: 9780226729800

Reviews for The Torture Letters

[pivic-1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

The worst bit about this book, is that it can't make up its mind whether to be a research-form paper or a spoken-word performance.

The good bits—nota bene: plural—make up for that.

This is a book that delves into systemic torture performed by police; the author focuses on Chicago, USA, which is simply symptomatic of systematic torture not only performed in the USA but all over the world where unchecked fascist rule is enabled. The book also goes into other areas where not only police are involved, but also places like Guantánamo Bay.

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.

Racism runs through the choices that police make, all the time. It's getting better, but let's not kid ourselves: the plague is still there.

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.

One of Ralph's best traits as an author is his ability to string together parts to make out a narrative in one single paragraph, like here:

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.

Ralph goes into length to explain how Jon Burge became infamous for not only applying systematic torture but allowing others to go on using it.

The witness testimonies are startling and required reading:

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.

My main issues with this book are Ralph's open letters to different Chicago officials. Although they are most definitely needed and warranted, I feel they don't really fit this book. In any case, I wish they'd been formatted so that they could have been part of this book as part of research; instead, they delve into the world of spoken word, even poetry, which I felt doesn't do the book too much good. It's not like hearing Fred Hampton orate, which would have been great.

Overall, this book serves a vital and fervent purpose. Everybody needs to know that police torture (and abuse) is rampant and must be stopped. The question is how.