From Ferguson to Baltimore, fatal police shootings of black civilians have dominated national discourse over the past year. Issues of race and police brutality are certainly not foreign to Chicago. Last week, two prominent pieces of local legislation relating to police brutality and the transparency of campus police forces made headlines. Check out how this national issue applies to our own city.
Chicago Police torture of African Americans
Last week, the City of Chicago Council universally approved legislation to give over $5 million in reparations to more than 100 victims of police torture from the 1970s to the early 1990s. Former Chicago police commander Jon Burge employed torture methods like burning, electrical shock, mock executions and beating to elicit confessions, many of which led to false convictions.
“This piece of legislation has been floating around for two years, but following Ferguson it moved along much more rapidly,” said Wesley Skogan, an expert in Chicago policing and Northwestern political science professor. “This political environment caused something that was bubbling in the pot for several years to finally come to fruition.”
One undertone the current debate over policing shares with Chicago’s past is race: both historically and today, African Americans are disproportionately targeted by police brutality. All 100 victims of Chicago’s police torture were African American. Today, young black males are 21 times more likely risk of being shot dead by police than their white counterparts.
Prof. Skogan studies current Chicago policing data, and said that while Chicagoans of all races file complaints about physical and verbal harassment, unconstitutional searching, and excessive force, these complaints come disproportionately from African Americans.
Northwestern activism for campus police transparency
As students, we regularly interact with and see a police force of a different kind: the NUPD. As a private police force, the Northwestern University Police Department, along with all campus police forces, does not have to be as transparent as a public one, and some Chicago area college students hope to change that.
A bill to require campus police to release the same information as public police forces passed through the Illinois House of Representatives unanimously in late April, and is now headed to the Senate. Activists at both the University of Chicago and Northwestern University have held rallies and campaigns to call their local representatives.
“The goal is to bring private police forces in Illinois under regulation, especially to make them open to Freedom of Information Act requests,” said SESP junior Emiliano Vera. “The Freedom of Information Act is a process by which citizens can request information about statistics of public agencies, like policing, to find things like racial statistics for stops and arrests. There’s currently no way to get that information for private forces.”
Vera said he believes that keeping a check on campus police is something that matters deeply to students at Northwestern.
“This is important to Northwestern students because we are governed by a private police force with no transparency,” Vera said. “We can believe they’re doing good things, but there’s nothing to hold them accountable. Their goodwill is completely up to them.”