Abstract
The intersection of policing and race in America has been problematic since the founding of the very institution of policing. A review of events the past few years is telling that something is terribly wrong in regard to police engagement with the racial minority citizenry, especially the African American community. This problem became so toxic following several highly publicized shootings of unarmed Black men by the police that, in 2014, then President Barack Obama, signed an executive order establishing the President’s Task Force on 21st Century Policing with the objective to study the state of policing.
Simon Balto has written a timely and important book that examines policing and Black Chicago. The author does an impressive job of illuminating, historically, strategies beginning in the 1920s and the through post–civil rights era, employed by the Chicago Police Department, and seemingly cheered on by Chicago’s political machine, which implicitly and explicitly subjected Chicago’s Black neighborhoods to heavy-handed enforcement often involving excessive force and significant civil rights violations. Perhaps the underpinning of this important book is captured in the author’s observation that, “Over the span of decades, Chicago’s police, political powerbrokers, and social and business elites have made choices that organized patterns of deprivation and crime in ways that lodged them disproportionately in black districts” (p. 259).
The book features seven balanced and extremely well written and referenced chapters. The presentation style is especially effective and engaging. Throughout the book, the author presents rich descriptive accounts of police abuses and in some cases political economic abuses aimed at Chicago’s Black citizens and their neighborhoods. These accounts are documented using primary and secondary sources. The author weaves these accounts together with scholarly analysis and historical insight. This presentation style proves effective throughout the book. For example, Chapter 1 opens with a horrid account from 1919 centering on a Black Chicagoan named Horace Jennings, severely beaten by a racist White mob and left lying on the street bleeding and semiconscious. A White Chicago police officer stands over his battered body hurling racial epithets while interrogating Jennings as if somehow he provoked the incident. The account concludes with a description of the police officer physically assaulting the already injured Jennings into unconsciousness and robbing him of his money. The author uses this account to launch an exploration into a documented history of abuses and the blatant derogation of Black Chicagoans’ rights and power to influence the oppressive system.
While each chapter offers important insight into policing Black Chicago at various slices of time, perhaps the most compelling is chapter five titled, “Occupied Territory: Reform and Racialization.” The chapter largely chronicles the 7-year tenure of Chicago Police Superintendent Orlando Winfield (O. W.) Wilson who was hired in 1960 and pulled away from a comfortable job as Dean of the School of Criminology at Berkeley to take on what had been a seemingly impossible task through the years, reforming a corrupt and ineffective Chicago Police Department. O. W. Wilson at the time was a leading authority on policing. Balto (p. 155) points out that Wilson’s administration “was arguably the most significant in the department’s history,” in terms of reform and implementing professional and “sophisticated” police practices. Balto (p. 155) writes, “It is no exaggeration to say that Wilson changed policing in Chicago—fundamentally and permanently.”
While Chapter 5 begins with praise of Wilson in Chicago, the author takes an abrupt turn and devotes the majority of the chapter making the case that many of Wilson’s reforms, especially his crime fighting reforms through aggressive preventive patrol, were to the detriment to Black Chicagoans. He posits that Wilson’s strategy of crime repression in Black neighborhoods was to assign omnipresent uniformed police patrols in constellation with plainclothes officers, to engage in stop, frisks, and enforcement of the smallest of miscellaneous crimes. Of course, Wilson himself believed this strategy could have an impact on crime, in constellation with crime prevention programs at the neighborhood level with full community support.
If Wilson’s policing strategy in high crime areas in Chicago was what we now label hot spot policing, he might have been on to something. There is a growing body of contemporary research finding that specific hot spot policing strategies have the potential of reducing crime. Is it possible that this is what Wilson was attempting to do with his deployment strategies? If so, and the question remains, to what extent was affected neighborhoods engaged before, during, and after the heavy police patrols? Perhaps the book and specifically Chapter 5 is an invitation for other scholars to examine Wilson’s strategy in Chicago from varying methodological lenses. With that said, Balto effectively makes the case that Wilson’s strategy further exacerbated police relations with Chicago’s Black community.
Balto’s work is seminal and a must read for any serious student of the police or for that matter those interested in the intersectionality of policing and race. Readers will definitely come away with a deeper understanding of policing and Black Chicago, and the brutal and discriminatory police tactics that many Black citizens experienced from the 1920s through the post–civil rights era in Chicago, and for that matter continue to experience today. A key strength of this book is its accessibility to a wide-ranging audience including students; scholars from varying disciplines who study race, policing, and/or criminal justice; and others outside of the academic community who just have an interest in learning more about this important issue, and how both implicit and explicit bias is interweaved through the fabric of justice. Police officers may also find the book insightful, and they may come away with a more informed understanding of the experiences of many Black Chicagoans. Moreover, it may offer police officers a lens that they are most likely not accustomed to viewing this issue through.
