“The Public Does Not Believe the Police Can Police Themselves”: The Mayoral Administration of Harold Washington and the Problem of Police Impunity

Fighting City Hall

The son of a Democratic Party precinct captain and a protégé of 3rd ward alderman Ralph Metcalfe, Washington cut his political teeth within the Cook County Democratic Organization, better known as “the machine.” He did so during a postwar period when Chicago’s black wards increasingly displaced their poor white immigrant counterparts as the machine electoral stronghold, while receiving comparatively few of the city jobs, municipal services, and other benefits that urban political organizations had long used to reward loyalty at the polls. A leader within Metcalfe’s 3rd ward Young Democrats organization, Washington would play a lead role in efforts to resolve this “black electoral contradiction” by first calling for the machine to better serve the needs of its 3rd ward constituents and then, when that failed, nominating its own opposition candidates. ¹¹ The ability of this organization to cultivate its own voter base and act outside of Daley’s control made them both attractive and threatening to the machine. This tension shaped Washington’s nomination and election to the Illinois State House in 1965 and would remain a key facet of his political career as he distinguished himself as a “black independent machine politician” with a strong tendency to buck the party line. ¹²

In 1969, Washington steered out of committee House Bill 2111, a piece of legislation that would have created a fifteen-member civilian commission overseeing the CPD. ¹³ Washington did so at the behest of Renault Robinson, head of the upstart Afro-American Patrolmen’s League (AAPL). Founded two years earlier out of concern for the declining “image-status” of black police officers, the AAPL quickly came to identify itself as a community-oriented, officer-led police reform organization. Reflecting a “new breed of African-American police officer,” AAPL members “spoke out against racism in the police department, breaking the traditional code of silence among police on such issues, and adopted the methods, strategies, and tactics of activists and so-called ‘black militants’ in the African-American community.” ¹⁴ This younger generation of black officers did so as the impunity of the city’s police radicalized key segments of the city’s black youth culture. In 1969 and 1970 alone, Chicago police killed civilians at three times the rate of their Detroit, Los Angeles, and New York counterparts. Although officials conceded that in a number of these cases police themselves violated administrative standards or criminal statutes, none were terminated by the department or criminally convicted for their actions. ¹⁵

Despite the manifest flaw of a police oversight structure which left complaint review and officer discipline in the hands of the department’s Internal Affairs Division (IAD), Washington’s support for this bill nearly ended his political career. ¹⁶ Even as the bill failed to gain any traction, Mayor Daley considered Washington’s actions the “height of political insubordination,” as they had the potential to undercut the influence the Daley machine exercised through CPD, a key aspect of the machine’s longevity. ¹⁷ Yet, over the next six years, Washington would continue to raise the issue of community control of police, while also sponsoring legislation to make illegal “stop and frisk” police searches and block the reinstatement of the death penalty in Illinois.

In the spring of 1972, State Representative Washington drafted a resolution in support of Metcalfe, his political mentor and now a U.S. Congressman for Chicago’s South Side. Earlier that year, Metcalfe had initiated the Concerned Citizens for Police Reform (CCPR), a broad coalition of black and Latino church and community organizations, after department officials refused to reprimand CPD Task Force officers who manhandled and arrested the treasurer of Metcalfe’s reelection campaign. When the police superintendent refused to consider a set of demands calling for reform and the mayor balked at Metcalfe’s invitation to a mass meeting on the issue, Metcalfe publicly broke with the Daley machine. Describing Daley’s refusal to meet as indicative of an “unwarranted and dangerous attitude,” Washington’s resolution reiterated these demands, including the termination of the department’s notorious Task Force, the recruitment and promotion of black officers and policy makers, as well as the creation of citizens’ review boards “acceptable to the community” for each police district in the city. ¹⁸

In breaking with the machine, Metcalfe fashioned his own version of black power politics that relied on the threat of state violence vis-à-vis the police as a rallying point for intraracial, multiclass unity. “In a moment at which black social stratification was beginning to accelerate, black people of all classes remained at risk of mistreatment by the police—even if they did not face precisely the same risk.” ¹⁹ Joining with the AAPL, Metcalfe convened a Blue Ribbon Commission that called for the creation of an independent civilian agency to receive, investigate, and make factual findings on complaints of police abuse, with the police superintendent retaining the authority to determine the penalty for an officer against whom allegations of misconduct were sustained. Over the next several months, CCPR and its coalition partners built up sufficient public pressure to force the resignation of the police superintendent and compel negotiations with the Daley administration—only to see these talks break down and the Daley administration unilaterally design OPS as a police oversight agency in early 1974. Located in police headquarters, OPS staff of civilians and former police officers was empowered to investigate complaints lodged against officers and report to the OPS administrator, establishing for the first time the principle of civilian oversight. Yet, CCPR and its allies acknowledged that by allowing the police superintendent to choose the head of OPS, this oversight structure effectively maintained the department’s control over the agency, ensuring that OPS would have little influence where it was most needed: the day-to-day behavior of police officers. ²⁰

In the wake of Daley’s sudden death in 1976, Washington would follow Metcalfe in fully turning away from machine politics. ²¹ The following year, Washington ran for mayor with little support from those aligned with the machine, but in a manner that laid an important foundation for his future political endeavors. At the outset, Washington tapped Robinson to be his organization director, placing him in the unenviable position of quickly pulling putting together a citywide campaign on a shoestring budget. Despite these limitations, Robinson built a campaign that drew on Washington’s electoral base of working-class black voters with a strategy premised on taking advantage of the growing divisions among machine voters. In a campaign letter to supporters, Robinson explained that in 1975, Mayor Daley had received 58 percent of the vote with solid machine support. Following Daley’s death, the organization he had spent a lifetime building faced a deep factional divide. ²² “With the machine vote split three ways, Harold Washington needs just a plurality, not a majority, of the vote to win,” Robinson argued. The AAPL’s Executive Director also helped to develop the campaign’s theme as one of fairness—“make Chicago the city that works . . . for all the people”—language he hoped would resonate beyond Washington’s South Side electoral base. ²³

On the issue of policing in particular, his campaign put forward a program to fight both crime and police brutality, including decentralizing control of day-to-day police activity, involving citizens in the development of criminal justice policy, and making OPS a “source of outside accountability.” ²⁴ Although unsuccessful, this campaign served as the foundation from which Washington won reelection to his State Senate seat the following year when the machine ran challengers against him, his campaign for Metcalfe’s vacated Congressional seat in 1980, and the basic framework for his second mayoral campaign. ²⁵

In 1980, the CPD recognized the Fraternal Order of Police as the sole collective bargaining unit for police officers, a move that cut into the AAPL’s dues payments and, as a result, its organizational capacity. At roughly the same time, Citizens Alert, a predominantly white, largely middle-class, volunteer organization, gained greater prominence in challenging police impunity. After its two-year campaign, for instance, reform-minded Mayor Jane Byrne expanded the Chicago Police Board from five to nine members to be more representative of the city’s racial demographics. In early 1980, Citizens Alert quickly began raising concerns about OPS lack of independence from CPD Commanders, its poor record of accounting for progress investigating complaints, and the agency’s general lack of public oversight, after Mayor Byrne appointed Captain Richard Brzeczek, a longtime department insider, to the position of superintendent. Like the AAPL, Citizens Alert volunteers turned to Washington, then a Congressman, to raise these concerns, prompting him to write to Brzeczek about OPS operations. ²⁶ Although he did not receive a response, Washington identified a host of institutional failures that would be on display just six weeks later during one of the starkest examples of police impunity in the department’s modern history.

Torturing with Impunity

Just after midnight on February 10, 1982, Alvin and Patricia Smith were awoken by the sound of at least seven plainclothes policemen breaking down the door of their modest bungalow on Chicago’s South Side. According to Alvin, these officers pointed guns at the heads of he, his wife, and their five children, as police ransacked their home searching for suspects in the recent deadly shooting of two white Gang Crimes Unit Officers, William Fahey and Richard O’Brien at the corner of 81st and S. Morgan Ave. Their killing brought to five the total number of officers in the area who had been shot in the previous month. Startled out of their sleep, the family would be herded downstairs and lined up against the wall of their own living room, while officers threw their teenage son to the floor and arrested him as a potential suspect. ²⁷ This family’s harrowing experience was one of some 190 complaints to OPS of warrantless search, destruction of property, unlawful arrest, or police brutality lodged during the manhunt for the killers of Fahey and O’Brien. ²⁸ Spread out over much of Washington’s 1st Congressional District, this manhunt was headquartered out of Area 2 on the South Side and led by Lieutenant Jon Graham Burge. A Southside native, Burge had risen quickly through the ranks, having made a name for himself as a fearless officer would go to any lengths to close a case. Hardly sleeping during the course of the manhunt, Burge was in the lead as “policemen began kicking down doors” in the search for the shooters. ²⁹ These actions continued over the next several days—only ending after an anonymous tip alerted police to the location of suspects Andrew and Jackie Wilson, both loosely affiliated with the Black Gangster Disciple Nation street gang organization.

Years later, Andrew Wilson would bring a civil suit claiming that Burge, detective John Yucaitis, and other unknown officers under Burge’s command had beaten and kicked him, after which he confessed. From death row, he later alleged that officers suffocated him with a plastic bag, subjected to mock executions, and electrocuted him - torture that continued even after Wilson had confessed to the killings. Reporters later concluded that as a former Army Military Police officer in Vietnam, Burge had been responsible for guarding, escorting, and transporting prisoners of war, a task that provided him with the opportunity to observe interrogations, including those using hand-cranked army field telephones converted to deliver a powerful electroshock, popularly known as “the Bell telephone hour.” During Andrew Wilson’s account of his 1982 torture and interrogation, he vividly described how Burge used a “black box” with wires and alligator clips on him, cranking it to generate an electric current. Wilson claimed that the electrocution hurt so bad that he was willing to do whatever Burge asked just to make it stop. The injuries on Andrew Wilson’s body were so pronounced that Superintendent Brzeczek felt compelled to forward to OPS a physician’s letter describing his physical condition. Despite these high-level concerns, agency investigators closed his case file three years later with a finding of “not sustained” on all allegations. ³⁰

The torture of Andrew Wilson was by no means an isolated incident. A mere thirty-six hours prior to the torture of Wilson, Burge, along with several members of his “A Team,” had interrogated Donald “Kojak” White following his arrest as a manhunt suspect. White would later accuse three officers of beating, suffocating, and threatening to kill him. ³¹ Three days prior to that incident, officers questioned Walter Johnson and Roy Wade Brown, identified as Black Gangster Disciple members, about the killings. They too were beaten and suffocated. In each case, OPS investigators concluded that their complaints did not have merit. ³² On February 5, 1982, a full four days before the manhunt for the Wilson brothers, Lieutenant Burge electoshocked Melvin Jones on his bare foot, his thigh, and his penis during the course of his interrogation for the recent murder of a state’s witness. ³³ As historian Julilly Kohler-Hausmann has noted, “the violence used by Burge and his colleagues was . . . political: the information-gathering functions of the interrogations were secondary to asserting the power of these police officers to torture with impunity.” ³⁴ Rather than serving a crime fighting function, this torture was primarily a means of reasserting police dominance in parts of the city where officers believed themselves to have lost stature as figures of authority.

This impunity was not only an important aspect of this pattern of police torture but also the emerging crisis of mass incarceration. In the years prior to the passage of harsh federal and state sentencing guidelines that regularly compelled defendants to plead guilty to violent and drug-related crimes, this pattern of torture prefigured the emerging logic of mass incarceration. Moreover, the fact that these torture victims were young black men reflected the emerging demographic trends. By the early 1980s, black men reportedly made up 75 to 80 percent of those arrested by Chicago police, but 86 percent of those held in Cook County jail. Similarly, black men and women constituted 61 percent of Illinois’s nearly 16,000 prisoners, even though they were only 12.8 percent of the state’s population. And of the seventy-four prisoners on death row from Cook County, later to be joined by Andrew Wilson and nearly a dozen other torture survivors, twenty-nine were black Chicagoans. ³⁵

While Jesse Jackson of Operation People United to Save Humanity (PUSH) and other high-profile figures spoke out against the dragnet manhunt operation, opposition was largely expressed by reassuring neighbors of victims and their families to file complaints with OPS. ³⁶ Over the next several weeks, neighborhood groups like the Concerned Citizens and Parents of Auburn Park, the Auburn Neighbors Civic Association, the Gresham Anti-crime Program, and the Accouters Community Center repeatedly met to discuss what occurred, alleviate rising fears, and develop a plan to clear the department’s record of unfounded arrests. ³⁷ Community leaders initially brought their concerns and demands directly to the local CPD District Commander and then to the police board the following month. ³⁸ In support of these complaints, the AAPL and Cook County Bar Association vowed to investigate allegations of police misconduct and called upon government officials to criminally prosecute officers found to have violated police procedure. Both organizations reiterated earlier criticism of OPS as a weak oversight mechanism, and alleged that a group of white policemen known as the “Ghetto Raiders” were responsible for some of the home invasion carried out during the manhunt. Falling back on the example of Metcalfe’s Blue Ribbon Commission, these groups convened a Community Commission on Law Enforcement. They held a series of hearings on February’s manhunt as well as other recent instances of brutality. ³⁹

During his campaign to unseat Mayor Byrne, Congressman Washington drew directly on these earlier reform efforts in crafting his campaign platform. To effectively benefit from the split in the machine vote, Robinson and other campaign advisors spoke of a strategy premised on turning out 80 percent of black registered voters whose votes would go to Washington. “The trick was energizing black Chicago without generating a corresponding white backlash.” ⁴⁰ Early in the campaign, Washington took aim at Superintendent Brzeczek by promising to fire him for mismanagement of the department, maintaining unfair promotional policies, and inserting himself into the election. And once again, police accountability served as a key issue on which to mobilize a multiclass black electoral coalition. Just prior to the primary election, “Beating Justice,” an NBC 5 investigative series, found evidence of cronyism, ineptitude, and repeated rules violations within this agency. In reviewing the personnel records of eighty-seven OPS employees from the past several years, Channel 5 investigators found that sixty-eight of them had job references from individuals linked to the police department or the Democratic macine. Moreover, investigators reviewed the results of some 13,000 closed OPS brutality complaints filed between 1978 and 1982, and found that OPS made a determination in favor of the complaintant in only 6 percent of the cases. In contrast, federal courts decided 62 percent of the brutality suits in the victim’s favor, with the city paying out US$4,958,503 in excessive force judgements during the same period, averaging US$20,921 a case. Of the 435 officers sued in court, 25 percent of them had two or more official complaints against them. And under the current director of OPS, police officials were ignoring a departmental regulation recommending a police officers with at least three complaints in two years for psychiatric counseling. ⁴¹ Central to Washington’s campaign platform was a commitment to neighborhood safety by, in part, establishing “an independent review process for the careful and attentive handling of citizen complaints regarding the police.” As the AAPL had long argued, Washington cast this commitment to rigorous police accountability as a means of ensuring for city residents the best police protection possible. ⁴²

“. . . That Time Has Now Come”

Due in large part to a historically unprecedented black voter turnout on February 22, Congressman Harold Washington won the 1983 Democratic mayoral primary. As Robinson had suggested six years earlier, Mayor Byrne and Cook County State’s Attorney Richard M. Daley, the son of the former mayor, had split the machine, and Washington bested the incumbent mayor by 36,145 votes. ⁴³ According to Abdul Alkalimat and Doug Gills, “it was all-class unity in the Black community that made it possible to strike another blow at racism and the systemic exclusion of Blacks from power that had characterized Chicago politics for so many decades.” ⁴⁴ On that day, Washington benefited from a 64.2 percent turnout by black voters constituting “an anti-machine rebellion” that would continue through the general election. ⁴⁵

While Washington had to contend with a surprisingly competitive general election campaign waged by Republican Bernard Epton, his campaign began planning how it would govern the city. On the day after Washington’s primary victory, for instance, campaign counsel Robert C. Howard, a longtime supporter of the AAPL, wrote to Robinson and other campaign officials regarding Washington’s proposal to fire Brzeczek. Specifically, Howard cautioned against Washington’s earlier proposal to appoint a Blue Ribbon Commission to select a new superintendent. While the selection process afforded opportunities for public comment, city ordinance and state statute invested the police board alone with the final authority to recommend three candidates to the mayor. A committee could not legally supplement the board’s work, but the police board’s identification of a final group of three candidates could be made more transparent through a public process where applicants stated their qualifications at a series of community forums and members of the audience offered their own questions. Given that the police made up the largest city department, annually expending one-fourth of the city’s budget, the superintendent, Howard offered, need not remain the only department head appointed without public participation. ⁴⁶

Similarly, in a March 9th memo, written just a month before the general election, Howard addressed Washington’s proposal to abolish OPS. During the campaign, Washington pointed out that in 1973, as part of Metcalfe’s Police Accountability campaign, he had proposed an independent fact-finding agency instead of OPS. “After various negotiations involving the city, the bar associations and the black-Hispanic coalition,” Howard wrote, “the city unilaterally created OPS as its solution. Both the bar associations and the community coalition rejected OPS as an inadequate solution, and said that the future would so demonstrate. That time has now come.” ⁴⁷ In response to critics that disparaged Washington’s proposal as a civilian review board, Howard indicated that what Washington had called for had initially been proposed in 1973 as a compromise between a civilian review board and the existing departmental disciplinary system. By revisiting this plan, Washington had only proposed separating “the investigation and fact-finding aspects of police discipline from the Police Department and placing them in a different city agency, to ensure independence and impartiality.” ⁴⁸ This proposal would not require a complete revision of the current system. The fact-finding agency would only make a preliminary finding. The superintendent would still be tasked with making decisions regarding suspensions, and the police board would play the same role regarding the discharge of officers. Howard again sought a creative solution, pointing out that it could even be implemented immediately through an executive order that transferred police disciplinary functions to the currently inoperative Department of Investigation. ⁴⁹

Yet, rather than relying on Howard, the direction of the Washington administration would be set by his Transition Oversight Committee, specifically its Public Safety Taskforce. Announced a week prior to the general election, the Transition Oversight Committee was charged with reviewing the current state of city government and translating Washington’s broad campaign platform, as well as the candidate’s particular campaign promises, into specific policies and programs. In contrast with the campaign’s Steering Committee, which had been majority black, the Transition Oversight Committee was composed mostly of white professionals and businesspeople. ⁵⁰ These demographics would also be reflected in the committee’s Public Safety Task Force, which was responsible for reviewing past reports, interviewing department officials, and preparing recommendations on the structure and operations of OPS and other city agencies. After holding a series of small public hearings on public safety matters, one in each police area, the task force began preparing a report that would go further in informing how the administration would handle matters of police impunity. ⁵¹

On the eve of the general election, the Chicago Defender directly responded to rumors of a plot by white police officers to make mass arrests of black voters. With reference to “white factions within the Chicago Police Department,” the Defender encouraged its readers not to be misled by the racism and ignorance of a small minority but to focus instead on winning the election. ⁵² The following day, Congressman Washington defeated Epton by 48,250 votes out of a total 1.3 million ballots. This total amounted to “two-thirds” of the city’s voting age population. ⁵³ This time, black Chicago’s “mass electoral protest at the polls” was joined by 24 percent of the vote in the Lakefront wards and 74 percent in the Latino wards, a marked improvement over Washington’s primary showing. ⁵⁴

Not long after his victory, Washington began receiving recommendations about Superintendent Brzeczek’s replacement and, more generally, how he could make good on his mandate to improve CPD. In an interview with the Defender a week after the election, longtime advisor Renault Robinson reported that the AAPL would recommend that the new mayor concentrate officers in high crime areas by disbanding the Gang Crimes Unit and taking other officers off of desk duty. ⁵⁵ Other police organizations like the Guardians Police Organization (GPO) sought to participate in the process of selecting a new police chief. ⁵⁶ And building on prior interventions by the AAPL and other grassroots organizations, Citizens Alert organized a series of workshops on choosing a new superintendent. Later that summer, the group also echoed Robinson’s recent calls for the abolition of the Gang Crimes Unit and identified the officers of the Unit as the brutal “Ghetto Raiders” of the Wilson brothers’ manhunt. They also cited as evidence a recent court injunction against the Unit’s frivolous arrest of black and Latino men on the charge of disorderly conduct. ⁵⁷

On August 21, Mayor-elect Washington delivered the keynote address at the AAPL’s annual fundraiser, a gala event that drew more than 1,500 people. He praised the group for its achievements over the past fifteen years. “As a direct result of the court battles fought by this great organization, the Chicago Police Department now has a Black membership representing about 2,300 officers, about 22 percent,” Washington pointed out. “It’s not a representative number quite yet, but it’s coming.” During his speech, the new mayor called attention to the fact that a majority-white police board had nominated three nonwhite candidates—one Latino and two black—for superintendent. This moment contrasted starkly with the years prior to the AAPL’s formation: “Chicago in the bad old days was a Northern version of a Southern plantation [where Black officers] were being used to keep Black citizens on the other side of the color line.” ⁵⁸ In noting the progress that has been won in the past decade and a half, Washington vowed to use his time in office to put an “end to unnecessary violence by policemen while we put a complete and total halt to violence in the home and on our streets.” With applause from the crowd, the new mayor singled out gang activity and illegal drug use as two key issues that would be the focus of his administration. ⁵⁹

Two days after the AAPL fund-raiser, Mayor Washington announced his appointment of Fred Rice Jr., chief of the department’s 8,000-man patrol division, as the city’s first black superintendent. A twenty-eight year veteran, Rice had previously commanded the Englewood district on the South Side and the now defunct Fillmore district on the West Side. Never a member of the more militant AAPL, Rice was, as one author put it, “a conservative, old-school black cop.” ⁶⁰ During the course of the selection process, Rice had vowed to “get tough” on those accused of brutality, isolate police with a track record of complaints, and, when necessary, bring them before the police board. ⁶¹ During his inaugural press conference, Rice reiterated this approach by vowing to ensure that police provide the best service possible to the city’s citizens. He also avoided commenting on the administration’s controversial plans to balance the budget in part by allowing the size of the force to decrease by several hundred police officers through attrition. More strikingly, Rice indicated that he would prefer to retain the current structure of accountability. “We’re going to look at OPS and I know quite clearly it needs improvement,” Rice explained as he shared the same stage as Washington. “I advocate keeping it, but we can refine it. It’s a good concept.” ⁶² In doing so, Rice distanced himself from Washington’s earlier campaign promise to get rid of OPS and publicly announced what would now become the administration’s position on the issue. This amounted to a pronounced, and ultimately tragic, shift in oversight policy.

It seems a variety of forces had prevailed upon Washington to reverse his long-standing position. During the course of the campaign, Chicago Police Board member Frances Zemans had initially floated this position on OPS. Writing to Washington as chair of the Committee to Make Recommendations for Improvement of the OPS, Zemans indicated that her committee had reviewed a range of opinions on OPS’s from both inside and outside of the police department, including the department’s 1981 and 1982 audits of the office. After “extensive discussion by the Board,” the committee had reached agreement on a set of recommendations. ⁶³ While noting the concerns regarding police accountability repeatedly raised to the board, its recommendations endorsed the continuation of OPS, “but with a number of changes that we believe will contribute to its goals.” Confined largely to developing more rigorous standards for the hiring, training, and management of investigators, the board’s recommendations hardly scratched the surface of earlier criticism of OPS, but helped to reshape this policy decision within the new administration. ⁶⁴

This position on OPS would be echoed in the Task Force on Public Safety’s transition report completed one month after Rice’s appointment. In it, task force members concluded, “individual and neighborhood safety is foremost in the mind of the public.” Indeed, public safety was “the most prevalent thought evinced by the research, interviews and public hearings of the Public Safety Policy Task Force.” Perhaps, reflecting the group’s more elite status, its observations and findings were relatively conservative. In contrast to even Howard’s clarification of candidate Washington’s position, the task force determined that OPS “has a very important role to play in terms of maintaining the public’s confidence in the Police Department because the public does not believe the police can police themselves.” Any weaknesses it demonstrated were not a reflection of its structural flaws, but instead, the misuse of hiring decisions by prior administrations, the lack of effective staff training, or the failure of the command structure to compel full participation by police officers. Although the task force report left it unclear whether OPS should in the future be independent of the police department, it did recommend that this office “should be [physically] removed from police headquarters to a location that is accessible and not so obviously associated with the police structure.” ⁶⁵

For his part, Superintendent Rice later credited Washington with taking a “hands-off approach” with OPS and other matters of department operations, primarily to avoid “the adverse publicity of anyone saying that he was interfering in any way with the police.” ⁶⁶ This sort of negative publicity would have been a costly liability in the midst of the “Council Wars” waged by the twenty-nine-member majority bloc of machine-aligned city councilors led by Aldermen Ed Vrdolyak and Edward Burke. Without a majority on the City Council, Washington would be forced to rule by veto, with his opponents delaying his appointments to boards and commissions while refusing to take up his legislative proposals. With an openly hostile City Council waiting months to hold Rice’s confirmation hearing, Washington likely determined that his administration’s approach to reform would largely consist of moving away from the Daley machine’s long-standing use of CPD to consolidate political power. ⁶⁷ At the same time, potential critics of Washington’s new position, like those in the AAPL who joined the mayor’s bodyguard detail, raised few complaints, either out of fear of weakening the new administration or out of concern for maintaining access to City Hall.

To improve OPS, Rice announced his appointment of David Fogel as its new chief administrator in June 1984. During his inaugural press conference, Fogel reiterated Rice’s earlier suggestion that there would be few changes to the structure of OPS, contending that the agency could win back the public trust through efficient and effective operations. ⁶⁸ What Fogel did not know was that between Washington’s election and his own appointment, Area 2 officers brutalized and tortured more than a dozen individuals, all of them black men and members of the city’s powerful street gang organizations. Four of the confessions coerced during this fifteen months would be used in capital murder trials that landed victims of police torture on Illinois’s death row. In nearly every instance, the victim or a witness filed a complaint—of suffocation, electric shock, physical abuse, or mock execution. In each instance, investigators dismissed the complaint as “unsustained,” citing the complainant’s refusal to cooperate, or a lack of physical evidence. On October 24, 1984, Fogel issued a brief memo to all of OPS supervisors asking them to report all unresolved complaints of police use of “electrical shock equipment” during the course of an arrest over the past year. Although it is not clear what prompted Fogel’s request, it is worth noting that this review of complaints occurred about one year after Rice’s confirmation. Furthermore, Fogel’s query came more than six months after the lawyer for half brothers Leonard Kidd and Leroy Orange alleged that his clients were the victims of “illegal but very sophisticated torture” using electrical shocks from a mysterious “black box” to coerce their confessions to a brutal quadruple murder. ⁶⁹ “The black box got them,” he argued, contending that an electrical device was being used periodically by Area 2 detectives. ⁷⁰ But instead of a clear pattern of electric shock, Fogel’s query garnered nearly a dozen complaints with victims alleging that they had been shocked with a taser while being searched or during some other point prior to arrest. Only Darrell Cannon, a general in the El Rukns street gang organization, had lodged an electric shock complaint that made its way to Fogel’s desk. Cannon alleged that, after being arrested for murder, detectives drove him to a deserted section of the South Side, “where he was cattle prodded in his mouth and testicles.” ⁷¹ Including Cannon’s complaint with others, Fogel wrote to Rice and briefly outlined a total of eight cases in which a cattle prod or handheld taser device had allegedly been used.

Instead of requesting further investigation by OPS of these allegations, Rice effectively buried them by issuing a notice directly to police personnel. ⁷² Under the title of “Uniform and Personal Equipment Information” and following a brief note on the regulation short sleeve shirt, Rice offered brief directions on shocking devices by first reminding officers that their general orders restricted them to wearing or carrying only a designated set of items. “Unless otherwise authorized by Department directive,” he stated, “members are prohibited from carrying/using any electronic immobilizing/shocking device.” ⁷³ With this as his only public statement on the matter, Rice not only helped to obscure an understanding of this sort of coercion as unlawful but also helped to cover up these allegations. Consequently, “electrical torture gave way to other means to the same ends in Chicago,” wrote journalist John Conroy. “At Area 2, the three electrical devices seem to have been retired in 1984, around the time that a defense attorney told local reporters that Area 2 detectives were using a black box to attack the genitals of suspects.” ⁷⁴ Through the rest of the decade, OPS would continue to receive dozens of complaints of torture and coerced confessions, with beatings, suffocation, and mock executions now replacing electrocution. Nearly all of them would be dismissed.

Conclusion

Having won the 1983 election as an independent Democrat, Harold Washington ultimately made several key compromises that limited his administration’s ability to attenuate even the worst instances of police violence and to contain the emergence of mass incarceration. To a large degree, these compromises reflected the racism and hostility toward his election as the city’s first black mayor. Racial hostility was reflected in the campaigns of his Democratic and Republican opponents as well as in the intransigence of the City Council’s majority bloc. Nearly three years of “Council Wars” blocked hardly any legislation from being passed. That being the case, it was not necessary for Washington to step back from his campaign pledge of abolishing OPS. Yet, forces in and outside of his campaign prevailed upon him to forgo the decade-long goal of installing an independent police review agency. Not only would this decision mark his first term, but it would also be reflected in the absence of any mention of changing the police review authority in his 1987 campaign platform. ⁷⁵ On November 25, 1987, less than eight months after his re-election victory, Washington passed away from a sudden heart attack.

Part of what makes Washington’s decision to retain OPS particularly unsettling is that institutional control of police accountability helped to suppress allegations of police torture for more than a decade. Rather than attracting media attention and fortifying a public consensus supportive of public accountability, the torture carried out at Areas 2 and 3 in Chicago remained during Washington’s administration at best a clandestine plot, at worst an open secret. Openly discussed among police and prosecutors, it was effectively disavowed in official investigations, courtroom testimony, and media coverage. Indeed, it would not be until civil rights lawyers for Andrew Wilson received anonymous letters from a police source in the spring of 1989 that proponents of police accountability had evidence that Wilson’s torture was part of a broader pattern of abuse. By this time, Burge had already risen to detective commander of Area 3; his former supervisor, Leroy Martin, had been promoted to Police Superintendent; and the former Cook County State’s Attorney, Richard M. Daley, had been elected Mayor of Chicago. While it is unlikely that legislation creating a new civilian oversight agency would have been given a fair hearing by his opponents on the City Council, it is clear that the Washington’s decision to accede to calls to retain OPS helped to keep police impunity out of the public eye, stifling the development of any political will to change it. Much like the cases of Andrews and Fauntleroy, the muted responses of the Washington administration to a pattern of police torture helped to enable and, to some degree, institutionalize this practice of impunity.

In November 2007, twenty-two years after his mother first wrote to Mayor Washington, prison officials released James Andrews from custody. A Cook County judge had determined that officers had violated his constitutional rights during the course of his interrogation and vacated his murder conviction. Over the next six years, both Andrews and Fauntleroy pressed wrongful conviction lawsuits and each reached settlements of US$1.8 million with the city of Chicago. Despite this and other efforts to compensate and exonerate the survivors of state violence, apologize on behalf of the city for their suffering and the years lost behind bars, and develop mechanisms to heal the deep divisions these actions created, the crisis of police impunity persists today. Indeed, the accounts of racially disproportionate harassment, police shootings, and unsustained complaints detailed in the 2016 Police Accountability Task Force report, commissioned following the release of dashcam footage of the Laquan McDonald shooting, echoed many of the findings made in 1973 by Metcalfe’s Blue Ribbon Commission. ⁷⁶ What has remained consistent over this period of more than four decades is a weak mechanism of civilian oversight that relies on the CPD to discipline itself and rejects the principle of a more democratic form of policing. ⁷⁷ Throughout his political career, representative Harold Washington advocated for key elements of this principle, but his mayoral administration failed to put them into practice.