Simon Balto > Quotes

“In the buildup to the 1919 riot, for instance, Wells had implored the city to do something to punish white terrorists targeting black homes for bombing. As we have seen, they did nothing.”
― Simon Balto, Occupied Territory: Policing Black Chicago from Red Summer to Black Power

“In the face of the Depression’s ravages, Chicago criminalized human misery.”
― Simon Balto, Occupied Territory: Policing Black Chicago from Red Summer to Black Power

“The dentist wiggled the drill from side to side as the prisoner writhed in pain. The officers pledged to have him do the same to every last tooth in the suspect’s head. The suspect confessed.”
― Simon Balto, Occupied Territory: Policing Black Chicago from Red Summer to Black Power

“But representation is not the same thing as power, and the hiring of a few black officers was an ambiguous victory.”
― Simon Balto, Occupied Territory: Policing Black Chicago from Red Summer to Black Power

“while twice as many blacks than whites had been murdered and injured in the riot, twice as many blacks were arrested and indicted.”
― Simon Balto, Occupied Territory: Policing Black Chicago from Red Summer to Black Power

“Police containment of vice to black neighborhoods had other effects, as well. For one, it reinforced racist perceptions of black people as unfit for urban life.”
― Simon Balto, Occupied Territory: Policing Black Chicago from Red Summer to Black Power

“depriving prisoners of sleep, banging rubber hoses across a suspect’s abdomen, placing a box over an individual’s head and filling it with tear gas, applying acid to genitals, hanging prisoners upside down by their ankles or beating them with poles to the point of eyeball dislocation and blindness”
― Simon Balto, Occupied Territory: Policing Black Chicago from Red Summer to Black Power

“The criminalization of black property violence in the sixties, compared with the failure to assertively criminalize white interpersonal violence in the fifties, is worth remembering.”
― Simon Balto, Occupied Territory: Policing Black Chicago from Red Summer to Black Power

“Historians still disagree somewhat on the degrees to which agency and constraint respectively shaped the process and outcome of this ghettoization. Exclusion and proscription weighed heavy on the housing question, as migrants found themselves hemmed in by the machinations of white supremacist housing policies, threats, and economic deprivation.”
― Simon Balto, Occupied Territory: Policing Black Chicago from Red Summer to Black Power

“the sight of a raft of black boys floating into white waters enraged people on Twenty-Ninth Street. A man named George Stauber began hurling rocks — stone after stone raining down on and around the raft and the boys clinging to it. Amid the hailstorm, Eugene Williams went under. By the time divers reached him, he was dead.”
― Simon Balto, Occupied Territory: Policing Black Chicago from Red Summer to Black Power

“Seeing these activities as affronts to public order, politicians and police forces responded.”
― Simon Balto, Occupied Territory: Policing Black Chicago from Red Summer to Black Power

“As this and the following chapters should make clear, there is an interrogation to be made about what happens when marginalized citizens seek justice and, in so doing, disrupt the status quo.”
― Simon Balto, Occupied Territory: Policing Black Chicago from Red Summer to Black Power

“Chicago in 1919 spiraled into racial fury, provoking questions about policing, racism, and justice. A century later, those questions have yet to be fully answered.”
― Simon Balto, Occupied Territory: Policing Black Chicago from Red Summer to Black Power

“Being a child couldn’t even keep you safe.”
― Simon Balto, Occupied Territory: Policing Black Chicago from Red Summer to Black Power

“And within the riot’s terrible violence, the police department revealed itself as an institution that would not work well for black people.”
― Simon Balto, Occupied Territory: Policing Black Chicago from Red Summer to Black Power

“The study was also devoid of any finding that indicated that those police problems extended to racism, abuse, or harassment. Anything that ran contrary to the CCC’s tough-on-crime philosophy was left unexplored.”
― Simon Balto, Occupied Territory: Policing Black Chicago from Red Summer to Black Power

“Meanwhile, some articulated this as a better age — a hanging moment in time before police-community relationships fell from a precipice.”
― Simon Balto, Occupied Territory: Policing Black Chicago from Red Summer to Black Power

“The city could have chosen to combat the effects. The Democratic machine, under Richard Daley especially, had its hands on so many different levers of power that it could have worked harder to stave off the effects of crisis. That it didn’t (and doesn’t) is a product of politicians’ priorities and political will, and of how they viewed the importance of some communities relative to others.”
― Simon Balto, Occupied Territory: Policing Black Chicago from Red Summer to Black Power

“On the decentralization of big city police departments more generally during this period, see Fogelson, Big-City Police, esp. 97–98.”
― Simon Balto, Occupied Territory: Policing Black Chicago from Red Summer to Black Power

“Invoking a trope common among anti-Communists, he ridiculed radical activity as the fault of “outside agitators,” rather than the organic response of angry and desperate people.”
― Simon Balto, Occupied Territory: Policing Black Chicago from Red Summer to Black Power

“South Side life could be traumatizing for the thousands of citizens who wanted to avoid the loitering, gambling, prostitution, drug use, and drinking that spread as a consequence of city policy and inequality.”
― Simon Balto, Occupied Territory: Policing Black Chicago from Red Summer to Black Power

“After they got them jobs, party operatives instructed police officers on which lines to toe, which laws to enforce (or not enforce), who to lean on or off of.”
― Simon Balto, Occupied Territory: Policing Black Chicago from Red Summer to Black Power

“Weekly if not daily during the worst throes of the Depression, black Chicagoans confronted a rapacious economic order, a racist relief system, and relentless city-sanctioned police violence, and they refused to be broken by it.”
― Simon Balto, Occupied Territory: Policing Black Chicago from Red Summer to Black Power

“Mayor Bill Thompson was vacationing in Wyoming, and he’d insisted on bringing Police Commissioner John Garrity with him, leaving Chicago without its top law enforcement official when the riot exploded.”
― Simon Balto, Occupied Territory: Policing Black Chicago from Red Summer to Black Power

“Imagine the plight of the fourteen-year-old Chicago boy, shot in the leg by a storeowner and subsequently arrested by CPD officers after he was caught trying to steal something to eat.”
― Simon Balto, Occupied Territory: Policing Black Chicago from Red Summer to Black Power

“So lax was the police response to the bombings that the Chicago branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) took it upon itself (without success) to do the police’s job for them;”
― Simon Balto, Occupied Territory: Policing Black Chicago from Red Summer to Black Power

“Indeed, they were so tethered to city politics that their offices weren’t even attached to police headquarters but sat in city hall adjacent to the mayor’s office.”
― Simon Balto, Occupied Territory: Policing Black Chicago from Red Summer to Black Power

“When Thompson returned to the city, he and Lowden (both Republicans, and intense political rivals) locked horns instead of cooperating,”
― Simon Balto, Occupied Territory: Policing Black Chicago from Red Summer to Black Power

“The time has come when the police of this city must be made to realize that the constitutional rights of the commonest citizen cannot be trampled upon with impunity. The time has come for a redistribution of justice.”
― Simon Balto, Occupied Territory: Policing Black Chicago from Red Summer to Black Power

“Crowds gathered. But Callahan refused to see Stauber arrested, and a short while later, he turned around and arrested one of the men shouting for Stauber’s arrest.”
― Simon Balto, Occupied Territory: Policing Black Chicago from Red Summer to Black Power