Getty Hesse

“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

“Mara, remember how you kicked sand into that neighbor child’s eyes? I yelled at you and made you apologize in your best dress, and that night I cried by myself in the bathroom because you are Bad’s child as much as you are mine. Remember when you ran into the plate glass window and cut your arms so badly we had to drive you to the nearest hospital in the pickup truck, and when it was over Bad begged me to replace the backseat because of all the blood? Or when Tristan told us that he wanted to invite a boy to prom and you put your arm around him like this? Mara, remember? Your own babies? Your husband with his Captain Ahab beard and calloused hands and the house you bought in Vermont? Mara? How you still love your little brother with the ferocity of a star; an all-consuming love that will only end when one of you collapses? The drawings you handed us as children? Your paintings of dragons, Tristan’s photographs of dolls, your stories about anger, his poems about angels? The science experiments in the yard, blackening the grass to gloss? Your lives sated and[…]”
― Carmen Maria Machado, Her Body and Other Parties: Stories

“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

“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