Millions in Reparations for Victims of Police Torture Gets Backing in Chicago — City Has Paid Millions to Victims of Local Maniac Cop

The city has already paid out $100 million in settlements in lawsuits related to the infamous police commander.

Commander Jon Burge filled prisons with innocent men he tortured into confessing.

By Hal Dardick, John Byrne and Steve Mills
The city of Chicago on Tuesday sought to put to rest one of its most persistent scandals, proposing a $5.5 million reparations fund for dozens of torture victims connected to former Chicago police Cmdr. Jon Burge and his so-called midnight crew of rogue detectives.


The proposal, negotiated with a key plaintiff's attorney and supported by Mayor Rahm Emanuel, would offer free city college tuition for victims and their families, free counseling for psychological issues and substance abuse as well as other assistance to more than 50 potential victims. The city would also issue a formal apology, create a permanent memorial recognizing the victims and ensure that eighth- and 10th-grade students attending Chicago Public Schools would be taught about the Burge case and its brutal legacy, cementing the scandal's role in city history.

But as much as the proposal seeks to end a painful, controversial era — Emanuel said it would "close this book, the Burge book on the city's history" — it is unlikely to stanch the flow of torture claims from victims. A Loyola University Chicago law school dean appointed by a Cook County judge has identified some 20 additional cases in which inmates may have been Burge victims. Other inmates who have made torture claims continue to fight to overturn convictions and win their freedom. And one lawsuit over the torture is pending.

Already, this stubborn scandal has cost taxpayers about $100 million in lawsuit settlements, judgments and other legal costs, according to lawyers.

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Victims of Police Torture Fight for Reparations

The Homan Square facility, exposed as a CIA-style "black site" where police detainees would be brutalized without access to lawyers or relatives, is nothing new to those familiar with the violent legacy of police commander Jon Burge.

Photo by Dennis Jarvis.

By Caroline Siede
Mark Clements was 16 years old when Chicago police officers took him to an interrogation room and beat him until he falsely confessed to setting a fire that killed four people. Though his past was checkered, Clements hadn’t set the fire and he told as much to the attorney who came to oversee his confession. After the lawyer left the room, the officers returned and beat Clements again. They grabbed his testicles and squeezed until Clements once again agreed to confess. This time around he signed his name to it.

RELATED STORY: How Torture Ended Up Being Used in a Chicago "Black Site"

While it might sound like a story from Homan Square, Chicago’s police “black site” recently unearthed by The Guardian, Clement’s arrest took place over 30 years ago. On June 25, 1981, he joined the ranks of more than 100 black men and women who were tortured by police commander Jon Burge or his “midnight crew” of detectives on Chicago’s South Side from 1972-1991. Though the Homan Square reveal shocked the country, many local activists were unsurprised to hear that Chicago’s old police torture tactics had found a new home.

Based mostly on his coerced confession, Clements became the youngest person in the history of Illinois to get a life sentence without the possibility of parole. He spent nearly three decades in prison. Only a month before his arrest, Clements had become the father to a baby girl. The next time he greeted her in public, she was 28 years old. It was the day she picked him up from prison in 2009.

I first saw Clements on a rainy December morning at a protest in front of the Chicago Police Department Headquarters.

Now 50 years old, Clements is a civil rights activist who works to free those wrongfully convicted (he earned both his GED and his Bachelor’s Degree in prison). He’s congenial, with the air of a showman. When I arrived he was strolling up to strangers to introduce himself.

Called the “Holiday Action To Pass Reparations For Chicago Torture Survivors,” the protest began with a five-mile march from the Police HQ to the Mayor’s Office in City Hall, where we would deliver the signatures of 45,000 supporters.

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Facing the Truth: The Case for Reparations

Ta-Nehisi Coates, a senior editor at The Atlantic magazine.

By Moyers & Company
Signs of overt racism still are all around us, be it a New Hampshire police commissioner’s use of an ethnic slur to describe President Obama or an NBA team owner’s disturbing remarks about black athletes and fans. By now, we all know the drill, the media calls these people out for their ugly words and we play our parts, shaking our heads in sad disbelief — then return to our daily lives.

Ta-Nehisi Coates, a senior editor at The Atlantic magazine, thinks it’s time for a bold step to change the way we talk and think about race in America. This week, Bill speaks to Coates about his June cover story for the magazine, provocatively titled “The Case for Reparations.” In it, Coates argues that we have to dig deeper into our past and the original sin of slavery, confronting the institutional racism that continues to pervade society. From the lynching tree to today’s mass incarceration of young African-Americans, he says we need to examine our motives more intently and reconcile the moral debt and economic damage inflicted upon generations of black Americans.

For one, Coates points to a century of racist and exploitive housing policies that made it hard for African-Americans to own homes and forced them to live in poorer neighborhoods with unequal access to a good education, resulting in a major wealth gap between black and white. In fact, the median wealth of white households is 20 times that of black households, according to a Pew Research Center study.

“There are plenty of African-Americans in this country — and I would say this goes right up to the White House — who are not by any means poor, but are very much afflicted by white supremacy,” Coates says. By white supremacy Coates says he refers to an age-old system in America which holds that whites “should always be ensured that they will not sink to a certain level. And that level is the level occupied by black people.”

Coates explains to Moyers: “I am not asking you as a white person to see yourself as an enslaver. I’m asking you as an American to see all of the freedoms that you enjoy and see how they are rooted in things that the country you belong to condoned or actively participated in the past.”

Producer: Gina Kim. Segment Producer: Lena Shemel. Editor: Sikay Tang. Intro & Outro Producer: Lena Shemel. Intro & Outro Editor: Rob Kuhns.

Reprinted with the permission of Moyers & Company

These Eight Charts Show Why Racial Equality Is a Myth in America

These Eight Charts Show Why Racial Equality Is a Myth in America (via Moyers & Company)

Ta-Nehisi Coates’ cover story at The Atlantic, “The Case for Reparations,” published last night — and the subject of this week’s Moyers & Company interview — shows how dramatically the legacy of slavery and centuries of legalized and institutionalized…