The Torture Letters: Reckoning with Police Violence

by Laurence Ralph

Torture is an open secret in Chicago. Nobody in power wants to acknowledge this grim reality, but everyone knows it happens—and that the torturers are the police. Three to five new claims are submitted to the Torture Inquiry and Relief Commission of Illinois each week. Four hundred cases are currently pending investigation. Between 1972 and 1991, at least 125 black suspects were tortured by Chicago police officers working under former Police Commander John Burge. As the more recent revelations from the Homan Square “black site” show, that brutal period is far from a historical anomaly. For more than fifty years, police officers who took an oath to protect and serve have instead beaten, electrocuted, suffocated, and raped hundreds—perhaps thousands—of Chicago residents.

In The Torture Letters, Laurence Ralph chronicles the history of torture in Chicago, the burgeoning activist movement against police violence, and the American public’s complicity in perpetuating torture at home and abroad. Engaging with a long tradition of epistolary meditations on racism in the United States, from James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time to Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Between the World and Me, Ralph offers in this book a collection of open letters written to protestors, victims, students, and others. Through these moving, questing, enraged letters, Ralph bears witness to police violence that began in Burge’s Area Two and follows the city’s networks of torture to the global War on Terror. From Vietnam to Geneva to Guantanamo Bay—Ralph’s story extends as far as the legacy of American imperialism. Combining insights from fourteen years of research on torture with testimonies of victims of police violence, retired officers, lawyers, and protestors, this is a powerful indictment of police violence and a fierce challenge to all Americans to demand an end to the systems that support it.
 
With compassion and careful skill, Ralph uncovers the tangled connections among law enforcement, the political machine, and the courts in Chicago, amplifying the voices of torture victims who are still with us—and lending a voice to those long deceased.

Genres: Nonfiction, History, Politics, Anthropology, Sociology, Race, Anti Racist

248 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 9, 2020

About the author

Laurence Ralph is a Professor of Anthropology at Princeton University. Before that, he was a Professor of African American Studies and Anthropology at Harvard University, where he taught for nearly a decade. He earned his Ph.D. (2010) and Masters of Arts degrees (2006) in Anthropology from the University of Chicago, and a Bachelor of Science degree (2004) from Georgia Institute of Technology, where he majored in History, Technology and Society. His research and writing explores how police abuse, mass incarceration, and crime make disease, disability, and premature death seem like natural outcomes for people of color, who are often seen as expendable by “polite” society.

Ralph is known for using careful and deliberate description rather than esoteric theory to ensure that his research findings are comprehensible to a broader range of intellectuals, experts, college students, and curious readers. In each of his research projects, he discusses experiences of violence, debilitating injury, and/or death to examine the stereotypes and prejudices associated with America’s inner-cities.

Ralph has been awarded a number of honors and prestigious fellowships for his research, some of which include: Cultural Anthropology grants from the National Science Foundation as well as the Wenner Gren Foundation, the Andrew Carnegie Fellowship from the Carnegie Corporation of New York, a visiting fellowship from the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, membership at the Institute for Advanced Study, a Ford Foundation Diversity Postdoctoral Fellowship from the National Research Council of the National Academies, and the Du Bois-Mandela-Rodney Post-Doctoral fellowship from the University of Michigan.

Ralph currently lives in Princeton, New Jersey with his wife and daughter.

Reviews

[Richard]

NOTICE: The University of Chicago Press is making this ebook available for free until June 6th, 2020.

Go to this link — https://press.uchicago.edu/books/free... — and give them an email address. I think they'll use it to offer you a free ebook every month thereafter? If you're paranoid, give them a burner email, although the final .acsm file will require ‘activation’ via Adobe, so you'll need to create a fake account there, soo.

[Jamie · Rating 4 out of 5]

We’re just now beginning to reckon with the militarization of police, not to mention the racism or corruption, but let’s talk about how four decades in CPD gets you a job at Guantanamo. How public school kids had to travel to the UN in Geneva to get their case heard—only to be dismissed and insulted by the DOJ. How this was published in January 2020 but still doesn’t talk about Homan Square or police bonds or [insert endless names here] because the scope is just so big, in one city, that one book can’t cover it.

[Never Without a Book · Rating 5 out of 5]

I completed this book days ago and I'm still in tears. This book...my God. read it.

[Hannah Lin · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5

[jess ~has abandoned GR~ · Rating 5 out of 5]

When approaching a nonfiction book about such a heavy topic written by a Princeton University professor, it's normal to assume that it's going to be a slow and difficult read. But in this case, you would be wrong.

Written as a series of open letters to victims, witnesses, and past and future leaders of Chicago, the book focuses on the (unfortunately radical) premise that torture is ALWAYS wrong, whether the victim is a wrongly accused innocent or a "bad guy." It is an engrossing page turner, and not at all what I was expecting.

It serves as a shocking indictment of the Chicago political system and CPD, which had for decades protected torturers and silenced victims. As someone who had grown up in the Chicago area, I was disgusted to read familiar names and hear of their roles in cover ups; some of these people are still in power.

However, there were still stories of hope in darkness, highlighting the work done recently by young activists in bringing light to crimes, and small steps towards reform in the Chicago Police Department.

It certainly challenged me to open and soften my heart towards perceived threats and not to buy into a societal fear that expects crime around every corner. Fear, the book reasons, leads to violence and torture, and we must be brave enough to say enough.

Also, it was not a religious book by any means, but it still spoke to me as a Christian in its assertion that inside all of us is a basic and inalienable holiness in our humanity, wherein no one should be subject to torture, whether you are an unrepentant killer or simply someone in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Recommended for: students/scholars in social sciences, community activists, people from the Chicago area, human beings in general.

arc received from the publisher

[Gabby R · Rating 4 out of 5]

I’m a fan of Renegade Dreams, so I was excited to read this book. While there are common threads throughout from Ralph’s earlier work (like Renegade dreams), I found this book’s contribution is mainly in methods. Open letters as a form to convey research findings can be incredibly intriguing and powerful. I’d recommend also taking a look at the short documentary film Ralph made to accompany this text… it’s moving and captures the themes of police violence and injustice in this work.

[Ethan Ostrow · Rating 5 out of 5]

If you want to know why cops decide to carry out mundane and extreme violence—and how this violence is both institutionalized and resisted—this is the book for you.

[CKQ Malone · Rating 5 out of 5]

“The central themes of this book are twofold: torture persists in Chicago because of the complicity of people in power, and it persists in the United States because of our history of violence against populations we perceive as threatening to us. These twinned ideas come together in the image of the torture tree.”

Laurence Ralph, Professor of Anthropology at Princeton University, in his second book illuminating a kind of violence in the city of Chicago, details a pernicious cycle of abuse and torture within the institution of the Chicago Police Department (CPD), particularly at the Area Two district covering a part of the South side. He proposes a metaphorical illustration of the torture tree, focusing a critical eye toward the CPD and their boundary-crossing actions in the pursuit of justice that often starts with the use-of-force continuum that dictates the conduct of police officers toward citizens. Understanding the mechanics of the torture tree sheds light on the connections between how the CPD govern themselves and other human rights abuses that take place far from American shores.

The Torture Letters isn’t yet another account sensationalizing police acts of abuse and torture through first-person depictions of violence against citizens. Its broader aim isn’t shock and awe engendering reader sympathy and tears. While there are sections of the book that will no doubt give rise to those feelings (if not outright anger), the quality of Ralph’s book is more or less tempered by the very construction of the letters themselves. The somewhat dampened tone of Ralph’s writing is not bound by overwrought depictions or even by the kind of jargon endemic in most academically published books, and through his writing Ralph maintains a conversational sensitivity that asks the reader to question their preconceived stances toward the police and how they’ve been allowed to operate, often with impunity.

“In the book I compare torture in Chicago to a tree—what I call the torture tree. The trunk of this tree is the use-of-force continuum of modern-day policing. The branches are the police officers, the extensions of that continuum. The leaves are the incidents of force that you so devastatingly described in your UN shadow report.”

Ralph organizes his book in four main parts consisting of open letters written to various people either affected by state violence or complicit in its continued advancement: all future mayors of Chicago, two teenagers the author personally witnessed being harassed by Chicago police on the corner of Lawndale and Cermak, Chicago’s youth of color, police superintendent Eddie Johnson, the late – former officer and whistleblower – William Parker, former officer Doris Byrd, activist Josephine Grayson and the late Francis Grayson, the late activist William Patterson, the late Dominique “Damo” Franklin, activist Page May, Guantanamo Bay detainee Mohamedou Ould Slahi, and the late Andrew Wilson.

Through the use of letters from the author towards various police and elected officials – both past and future – citizens affected by police violence, and local activists who’ve helped uncover such abuse, Ralph opens a space to interrogate moral attitudes toward victims and those inadvertently caught in a web of violence that let the abuse persist. Ralph’s desire to spend less time on the gory and heinous acts of describing police abuse provide greater focus on one of the major themes: “The symbiotic relationship between police and military that connects your harassment…to Mohamedou’s [Ould Slahi] torture is, and has always been, foundational to the US rule of law.”

“While the torture tree’s trunk is the standard set of protocols that guide a police officer’s decision-making process, the branches are the manifestation of those actions, which is to say, they are police officers themselves. Indeed, future mayor, in the anatomy of this tree, police officers are the branches because they are the human outgrowth of the use-of-force continuum.”

Though appearing later in the text, Andrew Wilson is of monumental importance, not because of the crime he committed for which he eventually died while serving a life sentence in Menard Correctional Center, but for the instructional example Ralph is able to elucidate from Wilson’s actions post-incarceration. While in the midst of being questioned for his role in a crime against two officers, Wilson was subject to brutality that became regularly enacted against specific Chicago residents through notorious officer Jon Burge and his A-team (AKA the “Midnight Crew”) of morally corrupt officers. Through the use of a particular black box and other tortuous methods, Wilson, like others, endured especially grim agony that left burns, scars, and other lasting marks on his body, both physical and mental.

Wilson’s handling by the police over thirty years ago led him to file a civil suit in federal court of his own accord. This eventually would lead him to the People's Law Office where Flint Taylor, among others, and after a long and protracted debate, would represent his case through a civil trial and its appeals. Through Wilson other cases were discovered; a picture of mechanized city corruption began to come into greater focus. Without that civil case and the evidence it uncovered there may have been no progress toward what then mayor Rahm Emanuel did on April 14, 2015 – and for the first time in the nation’s history – announcing the creation of a multi-million dollar reparation fund paid to individuals who claimed they were victimized under the leadership of Detective Commander Jon Burge. Although the city of Chicago has had many problems supervising claims in establishing its reparations fund (by the city’s own estimate it may take almost 30 years to settle every claim), the precedent established is no doubt important and could lead other cities to follow suit.

“By exposing the internal components of the machine, let us finally see where all the wires are connected: the wires connected to Black criminal suspects have led to the police department and to the legal apparatus of Cook County.”

Shifting from Andrew Wilson, the third section finds Ralph relating tales of activism both before and after what Wilson did in the court system and how that’s led to modern calls for an end to police abuse by an organization that originally conceived the Civil Rights Congress petition “We Charge Genocide.” What began as a plea delivered in 1951 to the United Nations detailing the crimes of the US government against Black citizens eventually led, over 50 years later, to the creation of the youth-led organization of the same name who in 2014 petitioned at the United Nations Convention against Torture, addressing police brutality toward Black and Brown citizens in Chicago and the lack of accountability stemming from it.

In the final section Ralph broadens his approach to state violence in highlighting the case of Mohamedou Ould Slahi, who was detained for 14 years at Guantanamo Bay as a possible link to recruiting Al-Qaeda members. The link to Chicago comes from one Richard P. Zuley who had spent nearly four decades with the CPD. In the early 2000s Zuley was called in by then President GW Bush to interrogate Slahi using enhanced interrogation techniques in which Slahi spent years cobbling details for an eventual and heavily redacted book about his time at Guantanamo. Through Slahi’s account Ralph draws connections between police abuse in Chicago and how those effects have also been outsourced in the ongoing war on terror. The end result settles into view a shocking cycle in torture methods used between wars fought on foreign soil and at home (it was rumored that Jon Burge had picked up or refined his torture techniques having served in both the Korean and Vietnam wars before arriving at the CPD).

“Concealment is at the root of all social interactions, says the sociologist Georg Simmel. I take this to mean that what we want to keep secret has an impact on our every decisions; the things we have to hide shape which things we decide to share."

One of the more damning depictions Ralph draws from his research is how the pattern of police abuse isn’t merely limited to those officers directly implicated in abuse toward suspects. Fellow officers, some of whom have suffered professional setbacks over having the temerity to voice their objections, and others who have pretended not to notice in the service of a pension, as well as city prosecutors, judges, mayors and other elected officials, and even other citizens who remain silent in certain cases (and here Ralph doesn’t absolve himself of responsibility, either, in particular with the teenagers he saw on the corner of Lawndale and Cermak); all of these disparate groups have a role to play in the torture tree. Ralph isn’t so much condemnatory in this regard and often tries to tease out the conflicting attitudes governing individual response when faced with such conundrums over personal and professional obligations. Take for example Andrew Wilson: does a man accused of murdering two police officers have the right to be free from police torture? Ralph questions his focus groups, as well as the reader, to examine their attitudes in assigning guilt, inquiring his audience to account for what end a police officer should be allowed the agency in which to perform their job. Not to mention the officers who knew or at least suspected torture was taking place and turned the other way,

The use of letters then become a powerful tool in expounding those questions perhaps more than most academic tomes reach because Ralph doesn’t limit himself to the dispassionate listing of facts and is able reach a middle ground in his ethnographic approach “that sheds light on the perspective of both the insider and the outsider.” Thus, he contributes to a tradition both archival and in using letters to highlight a troubling aspect of Chicago’s history that’s often overlooked.

“I want everyone to know that if a person holds an unfavorable attitude toward someone who has committed a crime or has been suspected of committing a crime, that is that person’s prerogative. But if that person wears a badge and has the power to torture a criminal suspect, then that is everyone’s problem.”

[Niklas Pivic · Rating 3 out of 5]

The worst bit about this book, is that it can't make up its mind whether to be a research-form paper or a spoken-word performance.

The good bits—nota bene: plural—make up for that.

This is a book that delves into systemic torture performed by police; the author focuses on Chicago, USA, which is simply symptomatic of systematic torture not only performed in the USA but all over the world where unchecked fascist rule is enabled. The book also goes into other areas where not only police are involved, but also places like Guantánamo Bay.

Here are the facts: between 1972 and 1991, approximately 125 African American suspects were tortured by police officers in Chicago. The means of torture were numerous, but they all were conducted at Chicago’s Area 2 police precinct, which is located in the Pullman neighborhood but patrols much of the South Side. Beyond these verified instances, in 2003 journalists documented other episodes of torture before and after these dates, and elsewhere in the city, placing the total number of survivors of police torture in Chicago at roughly two hundred.

With some rare exceptions, all the torture survivors were men, and Black men in particular.

Racism runs through the choices that police make, all the time. It's getting better, but let's not kid ourselves: the plague is still there.

Police misconduct payouts related to incidents of excessive force have increased substantially since 2004. From 2004 to 2016, Chicago has paid out $662 million in police misconduct settlements, according to city records.

Furthermore, there is no reason to believe that these figures will decrease. Hundreds of Chicago Police Department misconduct lawsuit settlements were filed between 2011 and 2016, and they have cost Chicago taxpayers roughly $280 million. When I was writing this letter in July 2018, the city had paid more than $45 million in misconduct settlements thus far, in this year alone.

One of Ralph's best traits as an author is his ability to string together parts to make out a narrative in one single paragraph, like here:

On July 5, 2018, Chicago youth of color staged a die-in at city hall to protest Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s plan to spend $95 million to build a cop academy. The young protestors set up cardboard tombstones with the names of people who had been killed by the police written on them with black ink. They also wrote the names of schools and facilities that had shuttered because of a lack of public funding.

Ralph goes into length to explain how Jon Burge became infamous for not only applying systematic torture but allowing others to go on using it.

The witness testimonies are startling and required reading:

Porch said that the police had handcuffed his arms behind his back and that one of the officers stood on his testicles. He said they hit him with a gun on his head. Then one of the officers tried to hang him by his handcuffs to a hook on the door.

My main issues with this book are Ralph's open letters to different Chicago officials. Although they are most definitely needed and warranted, I feel they don't really fit this book. In any case, I wish they'd been formatted so that they could have been part of this book as part of research; instead, they delve into the world of spoken word, even poetry, which I felt doesn't do the book too much good. It's not like hearing Fred Hampton orate, which would have been great.

Overall, this book serves a vital and fervent purpose. Everybody needs to know that police torture (and abuse) is rampant and must be stopped. The question is how.

[Clivemichael · Rating 4 out of 5]

Indictment of a corrupt and disfunctional culture. Chicago is the example, USA is the country. Presented in a somewhat dispassionate/academic style but successfully delivers the message.
"In one of my favorite stories about the We Charge Genocide petition is how that document actually reached the United Nations. I find the story so unbelievable that I have always wanted to ask you whether it’s true.
In 1951, the General Assembly had not yet moved to its new UN headquarters in New York, so to present the petition, you traveled to Paris. According to what I have read, upon arrival, you discovered that US government officials had gone through your luggage and confiscated all copies of the petition. Your name had also been removed from the UN agenda, erasing any official record that you had been scheduled to speak.
Such sabotage by the US government was not surprising. But your prescience in anticipating it, and your resourcefulness in defeating it, is quite remarkable.
Because of the possibility of foul play, which must have seemed likely since the Civil Rights Congress was a communist-leaning organization, and this was the height of the Red Scare, you mailed sections of the petition to several friends and allies in Paris and Bulgaria before your flight. After arriving in Paris, you visited each friend’s home and collected the pages you visited each friend’s home and collected the pages you had sent piecemeal and were then able to reassemble the document."

[maddie · Rating 4 out of 5]

The epistolary format was an effective and interesting one for delivering the messages of police torture. I found Ralph's reflection in his introduction on his inclusion of graphic descriptions of torture respectful; his adherence to the wishes of torture survivors whose stories he was telling kept it from feeling exploitative. He wrote with great detail on police torture by grounding the subject in Chicago. All the different connections between seemingly unrelated areas such as Guantanamo Bay and the Chicago police were was shocking. These connections were well fleshed-out. The discussion of the militarization of the police not referring to military tactics or weapons adopted by the police, but mindsets carried from combat due to the amount of officers who have also served in the military was new to me and I intend to keep exploring this idea.

[celia · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a brutal read - the text itself isn't difficult to understand. Ralph crafts a series of open letters to different audiences in Chicago and beyond to discuss torture, genocide, and humanity. I was surprised it was such a quick read, because that's never what I expect from ethnographic texts. It bears repeating though - it is a brutal read. It never gets too explicit, but to begin to comprehend the depth and the widespread nature of violence against Black communities in Chicago at the hands of not only the police, but the legislative bodies, other communities... it's painful. An incredibly important read, especially given the current moment.

[Madison Allen]

no rating because i read this book for a class. but this book is incredibly moving and accessible. i highly recommend this to anyone who is interested in police “misconduct” and how the police and the military go hand in hand. please pick up this book if you’re interested in learning about how the police works in our society

[DM · Rating 5 out of 5]

What a fantastic text about a horrible topic. His approach is to focus on the "open secret" of torture - and to highlight the violence of how open secrets of torture are produced/maintained. The appendix had an interesting reflection on his ethnographic lettering approach and how letters decenter the ethnographer/informant and home/field divides.

[Hunter Burgin · Rating 4 out of 5]

A great deep dive into police violence and torture through the eye of Chicago citizens. Told in a series of open letters, it's reminiscent of "Between The World And Me" by Ta-Nehisi Coates and "The Fire Next Time" by James Baldwin. Great reading for anyone interested in social justice and policing.

[Chuck · Rating 4 out of 5]

A powerful and distressing book. Through a series of open letters to various individuals, the author lays open the horrific wounds caused by the torture perpetrated by, and abetted by the Chicago police dept. and various politicians.

[Lisa · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 I wanted to like this book more than I did and that was underscored by the appendix. I think Ralph’s description of the purpose of the open letters was more compelling than their execution. I also think the abolitionist premise of the myth of innocence could be better underscored.

[Aaliyah · Rating 5 out of 5]

it’s amazing how non fiction becomes so appealing once you add in the element of storytelling
i would not have been able to bear this without ralph taking the time to individualize and personalize and anthropomorphize the torture tree

[Daniel · Rating 5 out of 5]

Chicago is the most segregated large city in the states. And to that effect, bias aggression.

[Cat · Rating 4 out of 5]

Strong 4.5, looking at how police violence is endemic to policing and its connections to wider military-level torture as well. Very readable.

[Eavan Wong · Rating 4 out of 5]

*How to write with embodied pain and care.

[FluffyNyctea]

So important. How can people not support abolitionism?

[Eleanor · Rating 4 out of 5]

The U Chicago Press offers a free ebook every month, which I’m signed up to; usually I don’t read them, but this one seemed extremely apt. Ralph conducted an oral history/anthropological survey of people—mostly African-American men—who have experienced torture at the hands of the Chicago PD over the course of forty years. It’s a tough read, and sometimes repetitive (he structures most of the book as a series of open letters), but it’s illuminating about the struggles that people in a particular region have been engaging in for years, without any national media coverage. (And it’s made quite clear that Chicago can’t be the only place in the Union where this occurs.)

[Kitty · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is a must-read. Ralph discusses institutional racism within the police force and the elements of society that need to be tackled so that racism can be eliminated. There is a specific focus on the Chicago Police department and its history of torture.

This book is not an easy read, it forces you to face some ugly truths about the society we live in and the way we have failed to deconstruct a racist society. Ralph does, however, offer hope and a direction in which we can move forward.

[Punk]

Currently free from University of Chicago Press until June 6, 2020. Requires an email address and Adobe Digital Editions to download or you can read it in your browser.