Pub Date : 2019-04-22DOI: 10.5149/northcarolina/9781469649597.003.0009
Simon Balto
The final chapter documents the wide range of Black-led activist efforts to reform the police at the end of the 1960s and in the early 1970s. The launching point is the assassination of Fred Hampton, Deputy Chairman of the Illinois Black Panther Party, in a 1969 killing orchestrated by the Chicago Police Department, the Cook County State’s Attorney, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation. In the aftermath of his killing, a wave of community organizations mobilized or expanded their protests about Chicago’s police. This included groups like the Afro-American Patrolman’s League, comprised of Black CPD officers seeking to end police brutality and ensure better police services for Black Chicago. It included U.S. Congressman Ralph Metcalfe using the power of his office to expose police violence and harassment, and the fight for community control of the police led by the Black Panthers. Some activists who advocated for police reform sought more responsive police services to better community safety from escalating gun violence; others, such as those involved in the push for community control, pursued visions of semi-abolition of the police as currently constituted. Binding them together was a common understanding that the CPD was not working for Black Chicago.
最后一章记录了20世纪60年代末和70年代初黑人领导的激进分子为改革警察制度所做的广泛努力。事件的起点是1969年伊利诺斯州黑豹党副主席弗雷德·汉普顿遇刺案,这起刺杀案由芝加哥警察局、库克县州检察官和联邦调查局精心策划。在他被杀之后,一波社区组织动员或扩大了对芝加哥警察的抗议活动。其中包括由黑人警察组成的非裔美国巡警联盟(african american Patrolman 's League)等组织,该组织寻求结束警察暴行,并确保为芝加哥黑人提供更好的警察服务。其中包括美国国会议员拉尔夫·梅特卡夫利用其办公室的权力揭露警察的暴力和骚扰,以及由黑豹党领导的争取社区控制警察的斗争。一些倡导警察改革的活动人士寻求更有效的警察服务,以改善社区安全,避免不断升级的枪支暴力;其他人,例如那些参与推动社区控制的人,追求半废除目前构成的警察的愿景。把他们联系在一起的是一个共识,那就是芝加哥警署不为芝加哥黑人工作。
{"title":"Do You Consider Revolution to Be a Crime?","authors":"Simon Balto","doi":"10.5149/northcarolina/9781469649597.003.0009","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5149/northcarolina/9781469649597.003.0009","url":null,"abstract":"The final chapter documents the wide range of Black-led activist efforts to reform the police at the end of the 1960s and in the early 1970s. The launching point is the assassination of Fred Hampton, Deputy Chairman of the Illinois Black Panther Party, in a 1969 killing orchestrated by the Chicago Police Department, the Cook County State’s Attorney, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation. In the aftermath of his killing, a wave of community organizations mobilized or expanded their protests about Chicago’s police. This included groups like the Afro-American Patrolman’s League, comprised of Black CPD officers seeking to end police brutality and ensure better police services for Black Chicago. It included U.S. Congressman Ralph Metcalfe using the power of his office to expose police violence and harassment, and the fight for community control of the police led by the Black Panthers. Some activists who advocated for police reform sought more responsive police services to better community safety from escalating gun violence; others, such as those involved in the push for community control, pursued visions of semi-abolition of the police as currently constituted. Binding them together was a common understanding that the CPD was not working for Black Chicago.","PeriodicalId":306137,"journal":{"name":"Occupied Territory","volume":"74 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-04-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"128376421","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2019-04-22DOI: 10.5149/northcarolina/9781469649597.003.0003
Simon Balto
The first chapter opens with scenes from Chicago’s Red Summer race riot in July of 1919. It explores the cascade of white violence that characterized the riot, as well as the armed self-defense that Blacks deployed in response. It also tracks the ways in which both police brutality and police neglect were features of how Black Chicagoans experienced the Chicago Police Department during those awful summer days in which thirty-eight Chicagoans in total were killed. From there, it shifts in the 1920s, when segregation in Chicago became more rigid, and explores how police corruption and political corruption worked hand in hand to shape the city’s Prohibition decade. It documents how politicians especially used the police department to their advantage, in particular by variously allowing vice operators to set up shop in less politically influential Black neighborhoods, and subsequently cracking down on low-level vice offenses by Black people. It also explores the long reach of police torture of civilians in 1920s Chicago.
{"title":"Negro Distrust of the Police Increased","authors":"Simon Balto","doi":"10.5149/northcarolina/9781469649597.003.0003","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5149/northcarolina/9781469649597.003.0003","url":null,"abstract":"The first chapter opens with scenes from Chicago’s Red Summer race riot in July of 1919. It explores the cascade of white violence that characterized the riot, as well as the armed self-defense that Blacks deployed in response. It also tracks the ways in which both police brutality and police neglect were features of how Black Chicagoans experienced the Chicago Police Department during those awful summer days in which thirty-eight Chicagoans in total were killed. From there, it shifts in the 1920s, when segregation in Chicago became more rigid, and explores how police corruption and political corruption worked hand in hand to shape the city’s Prohibition decade. It documents how politicians especially used the police department to their advantage, in particular by variously allowing vice operators to set up shop in less politically influential Black neighborhoods, and subsequently cracking down on low-level vice offenses by Black people. It also explores the long reach of police torture of civilians in 1920s Chicago.","PeriodicalId":306137,"journal":{"name":"Occupied Territory","volume":"17 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-04-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"125806483","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2019-04-22DOI: 10.5149/northcarolina/9781469649597.003.0004
Simon Balto
The book’s second chapter covers the decade of the Great Depression and the World War II years. One of its principal focuses is the rise of Chicago’s infamous Democratic machine, which emerged as the dominant force in Chicago machine politics after years of back-and-forth tussling with its Republican counterpart. Democratic leaders beginning in 1931 used the police force as a bludgeon against the Black community to try to force it to vote Democratic, and utilized it in other ways to control Black Chicago politically. This was seen most acutely within the context of the rising tide of political radicalism that shaped Black Chicago during this time, especially the labors of the Communist Party and, later, organizations with the Popular Front as they challenged Depression-era austerity and battled with the police as austerity’s frequent enforcers (as in the case of evictions). To check such radicalism, Democratic politicians unleashed the infamous Red Squad, which cracked down viciously on political dissidents, often violently and illegally, setting important precedents. The decade also saw the expansion of a practice known as “stop and seizure,” an antecedent to the infamous practice of “stop and frisk.”
{"title":"You Can’t Shoot All of Us","authors":"Simon Balto","doi":"10.5149/northcarolina/9781469649597.003.0004","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5149/northcarolina/9781469649597.003.0004","url":null,"abstract":"The book’s second chapter covers the decade of the Great Depression and the World War II years. One of its principal focuses is the rise of Chicago’s infamous Democratic machine, which emerged as the dominant force in Chicago machine politics after years of back-and-forth tussling with its Republican counterpart. Democratic leaders beginning in 1931 used the police force as a bludgeon against the Black community to try to force it to vote Democratic, and utilized it in other ways to control Black Chicago politically. This was seen most acutely within the context of the rising tide of political radicalism that shaped Black Chicago during this time, especially the labors of the Communist Party and, later, organizations with the Popular Front as they challenged Depression-era austerity and battled with the police as austerity’s frequent enforcers (as in the case of evictions). To check such radicalism, Democratic politicians unleashed the infamous Red Squad, which cracked down viciously on political dissidents, often violently and illegally, setting important precedents. The decade also saw the expansion of a practice known as “stop and seizure,” an antecedent to the infamous practice of “stop and frisk.”","PeriodicalId":306137,"journal":{"name":"Occupied Territory","volume":"8 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-04-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"116945429","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2019-04-22DOI: 10.5149/northcarolina/9781469649597.003.0006
Simon Balto
Overlapping chronologically with the preceding chapter, chapter 4 explores a localized “punitive turn” in Chicago’s policing arrangement during the late 1940s and especially in the 1950s. Driven by grassroots pressure from white citizens, the exposure of corruption both politically and within the police department, and the rise of the famed Daley machine, police power and the size of the police department itself both expanded dramatically during this period. Once elected, Daley radically expanded the number of police officers employed by the city. Those officers were also invested with increasing amounts of discretion, leading to the expanded use of stop and frisk and other tools that disproportionately were used against Black citizens. In a department lacking meaningful accountability mechanisms, this increased discretion also led to widespread accusations against police that they were engaged in the illegal detention of citizens and also of torture. The chapter also details the early onset of the urban crisis, especially on the West Side as neighborhoods there transitioned from white to Black, and an early-1950s “war on drugs” that police waged on the Black South Side.
{"title":"The Law Has a Bad Opinion of Me","authors":"Simon Balto","doi":"10.5149/northcarolina/9781469649597.003.0006","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5149/northcarolina/9781469649597.003.0006","url":null,"abstract":"Overlapping chronologically with the preceding chapter, chapter 4 explores a localized “punitive turn” in Chicago’s policing arrangement during the late 1940s and especially in the 1950s. Driven by grassroots pressure from white citizens, the exposure of corruption both politically and within the police department, and the rise of the famed Daley machine, police power and the size of the police department itself both expanded dramatically during this period. Once elected, Daley radically expanded the number of police officers employed by the city. Those officers were also invested with increasing amounts of discretion, leading to the expanded use of stop and frisk and other tools that disproportionately were used against Black citizens. In a department lacking meaningful accountability mechanisms, this increased discretion also led to widespread accusations against police that they were engaged in the illegal detention of citizens and also of torture. The chapter also details the early onset of the urban crisis, especially on the West Side as neighborhoods there transitioned from white to Black, and an early-1950s “war on drugs” that police waged on the Black South Side.","PeriodicalId":306137,"journal":{"name":"Occupied Territory","volume":"31 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-04-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"127778365","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2019-04-22DOI: 10.5149/northcarolina/9781469649597.003.0008
Simon Balto
The book’s penultimate chapter focuses on the late 1960s, as whatever tenuous accountability mechanisms Orlando Wilson had implemented were destroyed by his successor. With Black Power and left-wing critiques of the police ascendant, Chicago’s police, like those elsewhere, became increasingly reactionary and flirtatious with right-wing extremism, such as supporting George Wallace’s presidential candidacy and a cell of Ku Klux Klan members operating with the CPD. It also led to an overwhelmingly repressive operating ethos. While public memory canonizes that best in the CPD response to protests at the 1968 Democratic National Convention, the chapter shows that a more representative display of police violence can be found in an urban uprising on Chicago’s West Side that same year, following the assassination of Martin Luther King. During that event, police visited extraordinary and lethal violence on Black citizens, culminating in a rash of police shootings and Mayor Richard Daley’s infamous “shoot-to-kill” order. That sort of violence was part and parcel of a larger culture of harassment and violence that pervaded the police department by that point, and that was made manifest in everything from the “War on Gangs” to the routine killing of unarmed Black people.
{"title":"Shoot to Kill","authors":"Simon Balto","doi":"10.5149/northcarolina/9781469649597.003.0008","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5149/northcarolina/9781469649597.003.0008","url":null,"abstract":"The book’s penultimate chapter focuses on the late 1960s, as whatever tenuous accountability mechanisms Orlando Wilson had implemented were destroyed by his successor. With Black Power and left-wing critiques of the police ascendant, Chicago’s police, like those elsewhere, became increasingly reactionary and flirtatious with right-wing extremism, such as supporting George Wallace’s presidential candidacy and a cell of Ku Klux Klan members operating with the CPD. It also led to an overwhelmingly repressive operating ethos. While public memory canonizes that best in the CPD response to protests at the 1968 Democratic National Convention, the chapter shows that a more representative display of police violence can be found in an urban uprising on Chicago’s West Side that same year, following the assassination of Martin Luther King. During that event, police visited extraordinary and lethal violence on Black citizens, culminating in a rash of police shootings and Mayor Richard Daley’s infamous “shoot-to-kill” order. That sort of violence was part and parcel of a larger culture of harassment and violence that pervaded the police department by that point, and that was made manifest in everything from the “War on Gangs” to the routine killing of unarmed Black people.","PeriodicalId":306137,"journal":{"name":"Occupied Territory","volume":"128 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-04-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"128150732","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2019-04-22DOI: 10.5149/northcarolina/9781469649597.003.0005
Simon Balto
Chapter three documents the cascade of white violence in the postwar era and the often-failing police response to it. During and after the Second World War, a second wave of the Great Migration began again in earnest. As hundreds of thousands of Black people moved to Chicago during this period, their need for housing provoked pitched battles between the forces of integration and segregation. In particular, white Chicagoans routinely rioted against Black newcomers seeking places to live in previously all-white neighborhoods. As they did so, the issue of police protection of Black life and property emerged as a central question for both civil leaders and Black citizens to confront. As white police officers and the department’s white leadership responded to white-on-Black violence half-heartedly or, on occasion, by sympathizing with the white perpetrators, fair policing emerged as a pivotal issue for 1950s-era civil rights campaigns in Chicago.
{"title":"Whose Police?","authors":"Simon Balto","doi":"10.5149/northcarolina/9781469649597.003.0005","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5149/northcarolina/9781469649597.003.0005","url":null,"abstract":"Chapter three documents the cascade of white violence in the postwar era and the often-failing police response to it. During and after the Second World War, a second wave of the Great Migration began again in earnest. As hundreds of thousands of Black people moved to Chicago during this period, their need for housing provoked pitched battles between the forces of integration and segregation. In particular, white Chicagoans routinely rioted against Black newcomers seeking places to live in previously all-white neighborhoods. As they did so, the issue of police protection of Black life and property emerged as a central question for both civil leaders and Black citizens to confront. As white police officers and the department’s white leadership responded to white-on-Black violence half-heartedly or, on occasion, by sympathizing with the white perpetrators, fair policing emerged as a pivotal issue for 1950s-era civil rights campaigns in Chicago.","PeriodicalId":306137,"journal":{"name":"Occupied Territory","volume":"759 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-04-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"122989583","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2019-03-05DOI: 10.5149/northcarolina/9781469649597.001.0001
Simon Balto
Chapter five focuses on the years from 1960 to 1967, aligning with the tenure of Chicago Police Department Superintendent Orlando Wilson. Hired in the wake of a massive scandal within the police department, Wilson came in as a departmental outsider, and with aims to reform and professionalize the department and ensure greater accountability to the public. For these efforts, Wilson is remembered as perhaps the most consequential leader of the CPD in the department’s history. He implemented the first Internal Investigations Division and labored to better the image of the police in the eyes of the public. However, he was also a strong law-and-order proponent who firmly believed in an expansive police power, leading to an evermore aggressive police presence in Black neighborhoods that would have longstanding consequences and a contentious relationship with Chicago’s civil rights movement (known as the Chicago Freedom Movement) when it sought to use civil disobedience in pursuit of racial justice. At the same time, Wilson’s reform efforts—especially those intended to bring more oversight and accountability to police behavior—were fought tooth and nail by many of his subordinates, led by groups like the Chicago Patrolman’s Association, the Fraternal Order of Police, and other police organizations that were direct ancestors of modern police unions. In the end, this meant that systems of accountability, while technically implemented during this period, were dysfunctional in actually halting police brutality and other abuses of power.
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