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‘Chicago Police Torture Archive’ Details 100,000 Pages of Anti-Black Police Brutality
Between the 1970s and the 1990s, former Chicago police commander Jon Burge headed up a “Midnight Crew” of officers that terrorized the Black population of Chicago’s South Side. Now, a new online archive examines Burge’s legacy of “violence and terror” in depth.
An initiative of Chicago’s South Side journalism nonprofit, the Invisible Institute, the Chicago Police Torture Archive includes more than 100,000 pages of case documents that detail the allegations against Burge and his crew. The website also includes interviews with some of the more than 100 Black men who were brutalized under Burge’s command.
“This archive documents the persistence of civil rights and defense attorneys, activists, and journalists in wringing a trickle of justice in the torture cases and in holding the city to account,” said journalist John Conroy, a contributor to the archive project who reported on Burge’s abuses of power in the early 1990s, in an interview with Chicago public television affiliate, WTTW.
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