Voices: Chicago torture reparations just a beginning

Aamer Madhani | USA TODAY

CHICAGO — On Wednesday, the City Council is expected to take an important step toward righting one of the most shameful episodes in this city's history.

With the backing of Mayor Rahm Emanuel, the council is poised to approve a sweeping reparations package for suspects — most of them black — who were tortured by Chicago Police under notorious former commander Jon Burge.

The package includes creation of a $5.5 million fund to compensate victims with a credible claim. The City Council will formally apologize, create a permanent memorial recognizing the victims and begin teaching public school students about the Burge case in 8th- and 10th-grade history classes. Victims and their immediate families also will be provided with counseling.

From 1972 through 1991, more than 100 people alleged that police officers under Burge's command committed horrific abuses against them. The suspects were subjected to mock executions and electric shock and beaten with telephone books as their interrogators flung racial epithets at them. A Chicago Police Department review board ruled in 1993 that Burge's officers had used torture, and he was fired.

The statute of limitations ran out on his alleged crimes, but Burge was convicted in 2010 of perjury in civil proceedings for lying about torture he oversaw. He was sentenced to 4-1/2 years in prison and completed his sentence earlier this year. Burge continues to receive a police pension.

While the moment marks a bookend to one of Chicago's ugliest chapters, city officials would be wise to use this occasion as a starting point in taking a deeper accounting of the endemic problem of police brutality and mistreatment of minorities.

Like Baltimore, where long festering mistrust of police in the African-American community exploded into violence last week following the death of 25-year-old Freddie Gray while in police custody, Chicago has a worrisome track record, too.

The day after Emanuel announced his support for the Burge reparations package in April, the city approved a $5 million payout to Laquan McDonald, a black teenager fatally shot 16 times by police last fall. The relatively quick — and big — settlement came even before the family filed suit. The city, thus far, has refused to release police video of the incident because they say doing so could interfere with a federal investigation.

Meanwhile, the American Civil Liberties Union in March published a study that showed black Chicagoans were subjected to 72% of all stop-and-frisk searches, even though blacks make up only about a third of the city's population. Police officers are legally able to stop, question and frisk someone if the officer has reasonable suspicion that the person has engaged in criminal activity, or is about to.

But in Chicago, where police last summer conducted about 250,000 stop-and-frisks that did not lead to an arrest, the practice is being carried out in a way that threatens to poison the relationship with a huge swath of the city.

Since the publication of the ACLU report, six local African Americans who say they were subjected to unwarranted stop-and-frisk have filed suits against the city and police department, charging their constitutional rights and those of many other had been violated.

In supporting the Burge reparations, Mayor Emanuel deserves credit for showing moral gumption, in sharp contrast to his predecessor, Richard M. Daley.

Daley, a Cook County prosecutor during a chunk of the Burge era, refused to apologize for the torture. He fought vigorously to fend off lawsuits from many of the victims — even after the police department review board affirmed the torture claims.

The city has already spent nearly $100 million on legal fees and settlements related to Burge — a massive amount for a city buried under $20 billion in unmet pension obligations.

Darrell Cannon, one of Burge's victims, told me Emanuel and the City Council deserve credit for doing the right thing.

Cannon wasn't the most sympathetic character when he was picked up as a murder suspect by Burge's men in 1983, less than a year after he was paroled following a 12-year sentence for a 1971 murder conviction.

In the 1983 case, he said, Burge's officers performed mock executions and repeatedly shocked his genitals with an electric cattle prod before he finally confessed. Prosecutors eventually dropped the murder charge against him, but he ended up spending 24 years in prison.

"I'm going to be the first to thank the mayor and City Council for trying to make things right," Cannon told me. "But this has just got to be the beginning."

Madhani is USA TODAY's Chicago-based correspondent.