A Human Right to Reparations: Black People against Police Torture and the Roots of the 2015 Chicago Reparations Ordinance

No one shall be subjected to torture or to cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment.
—United Nations, Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Article 5

On May 6, 2015, the Chicago City Council adopted legislation that formally sought to repair the damage wrought by a decades-long pattern of police torture. For years, a group of Chicago Police Department (CPD) officers had used torture to coerce confessions from residents of the city’s overwhelmingly Black South Side. After months of careful negotiations between City Hall and the advocates for torture survivors, the council unanimously passed an ordinance providing for financial compensation for torture survivors. For both survivors and their immediate family members, the bill offered nonfinancial compensation in the form of free psychological counseling, job training, and college education. It also mandated the inclusion of the torture cases in the standard curriculum of the city’s public high schools. Moreover, the council approved a resolution that offered a formal statement of remorse on behalf of the city. Before a packed audience that included torture survivors, their family members, and local supporters, several aldermen reiterated this apology—an act that brought several survivors in the audience to tears.1

Officially entitled, “Reparations for Burge Torture Victims,” this ordinance and its accompanying resolution directly addressed the use of torture by former police officer Jon Burge and those who had been under his command at Area 2 and 3 detective headquarters on the city’s South and Southwest Sides. According to the department’s own investigation, Burge and his associates had used beatings, burnings, suffocation, electric shock, and mock executions to coerce confessions from more than a hundred suspects between 1972 and 1991. As nearly all of these suspects were Black men, officers routinely employed racial epithets and attacks to the genitals to degrade and belittle those held in their custody. “The type of abuse was not limited to the usual beating, but went into such esoteric areas as psychological techniques and planned torture,” a 1990 internal department report read. “Particular command members were aware of the systemic abuse and perpetuated it either by actively participating in same or failing to take any action to bring it to an end.”2 Despite repeated allegations of misconduct and brutality, Burge would rise to the rank of commander, before this internal report confirmed these prior allegations and hastened his firing in 1993. Yet, in the decades that followed, city officials allowed Burge to keep his $3,400.71 monthly police pension and neglected to hold those involved in torture accountable, effectively allowing what had long been an open secret to develop into a festering wound on the city’s body politic.3

For its part, the torture reparations resolution sought to break with this established tradition of official silence on the issue of police torture:

The City Council recognizes that words alone cannot adequately convey the deep regret and remorse that we and our fellow citizens feel for any and all harm that was inflicted by Burge and the officers under his command. And yet, words do matter. For only words can end the silence about wrongs that were committed and injustices that were perpetuated, and enable us, as a City, to take the steps necessary to ensure that similar acts never again occur in Chicago.4

For many of those involved, this spirit of humility and reconciliation helped to make that afternoon’s vote not only a historic event, but also a cathartic development. “I want to say to the rest of the world and Chicago, we get it,” explained Alderman Howard Brookins, a co-sponsor of the legislative package. “That type of behavior will not be tolerated in our city, and we can work together bringing the community and the people together for the betterment of our city.”5 Similarly, Steven Hawkins, Amnesty International USA’s executive director, remarked that “passing this ordinance will not only give long-overdue reparations to survivors, it will help set a precedent of U.S. authorities taking concrete measures to hold torturers accountable.”6 Months later, when torture survivor Curtis Milsap, who had been beaten and kicked by detectives under Burge’s command in 1991, reflected on what the $100,000 compensation check he received from the city meant to him, the reply was straightforward: “This is a blessed day. I’m glad some kind of justice was served.”7

The successful passage of the reparations ordinance and resolution is even more striking in light of the impasse survivors and their supporters faced a decade prior, as entrenched opposition had repeatedly thwarted attempts to leverage domestic mechanisms of accountability. In 2006, a team of special prosecutors released a 292-page report that confirmed allegations of “prisoner abuse” at Areas 2 and 3, but also attempted to close the books on the police torture scandal by concluding that Illinois’ statute of limitations for torture and related crimes had expired during this four-year review process.8 Moreover, the prosecutors rejected longstanding claims that an “ongoing conspiracy to obstruct justice” had prevented criminal charges from being filed up to that point.9 Yet at the very moment at which Chicago officials seemed most “determined to tolerate, protect, and in some cases even reward, the brutal and inhumane treatment of primarily Black men and boys by its police force,”10 the landscape had begun to shift, leading to actions at the local, state, and federal levels that would make the reparations ordinance’s adoption plausible.

This article contends that this shift is primarily due to the intervention of Black People Against Police Torture (BPAPT), a grassroots organization of attorneys, local activists, community members, and relatives of torture survivors. Founded in the months following the 2006 release of the special prosecutors’ report, BPAPT, in the words of two of its key leaders, sought to infuse “new energy and ideas in the effort to secure justice in the Burge cases … [by bringing] the crucial perspective of Black thought leadership to the forefront of the Chicago Police Torture struggle after decades of many groups and individuals exhausting all traditional options.”11 Central to this thought leadership was the strategic use of international institutions to raise awareness abroad and apply outside pressure on U.S. officials for their failure to adhere to international law. This use of human rights norms and United Nations (UN) institutions came after decades of failing to undermine the impunity enjoyed by Burge and other police officers through various administrative and legal mechanisms of accountability. “We tried a bit of everything,” BPAPT’s Standish Willis later recalled. “and they wouldn’t do it. They simply would not do it until we went international.”12 Indeed, it was only after first bringing these cases of Chicago police torture before the world, primarily through institutions empowered to oversee the implementation of the relevant human rights treaties, that the BPAPT began to make headway domestically. Rather than signaling the exhaustion of decades of local advocacy, this pivot to the international arena would reinvigorate this struggle. Within less than a decade, BPAPT’s efforts to raise these torture cases as gross human rights violations helped to prompt the federal prosecution of Burge in 2008, the adoption of the Illinois Torture Inquiry and Relief Commission Act one year later, and then the passage of the groundbreaking reparations ordinance in 2015.

The history of these breakthroughs cuts against recent scholarship that has raised concerns about the insufficiency of human rights in both theory and practice. Ranging from ethnographies of post-conflict reconciliation projects to narrative histories of international advocacy organizations, this scholarship has cast the post–Cold War promise of human rights and their supranational mechanisms as ultimately a hollow one. Rather than succeeding in their quest to secure a less violent and more just world, these scholars argue, an internationalism rooted in individual rights has proven to be a deeply imperfect project, one that has failed to realize the lofty expectation of its proponents.13 “Though they were born as an alternative to grand political missions—or even as a moral criticism of politics— human rights were forced to take on the grand political mission of providing a global framework for the achievement of freedom, identity, and prosperity,” writes historian Samuel Moyn. “They were forced slowly but surely, to assume the very maximalism they triumphed by avoiding.”14 Writing at a moment during which human rights had become both hegemonic and seemingly ineffective, these scholars have raised sharp critiques about the illusory nature of their utopian vision.

While apt for the universalistic conception of human rights best associated with nongovernmental organizations like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, these critiques find less purchase when applied to BPAPT. In its relatively short lifespan, BPAPT remained grounded in a centuries-old tradition of Black politics that approached the international arena as an additional terrain of struggle and human rights as a language through which to more fully articulate the terms of this struggle. At the founding of the UN in 1945, as historian Carol Anderson argues, proponents of this sort of internationalism sought to “make human rights the standard for equality” and, in so doing, threatened to expose “the depths of America’s flawed democracy to the world.”15 Although unsuccessful in this initial instance, Black organizations and intellectuals continued to draw on what historian Gerald Horne describes as a strategy of engaging “forcefully on the global stage as a pressure point here on the North American mainland.”16 In mining the strategic insights of this particular vein of Black politics, BPAPT sought to overcome Chicago’s culture of police impunity, reflected in the assorted obstacles to accountability. Within a crucial period of time, BPAPT was able to make headway by using relatively novel mechanisms for human rights monitoring, namely international treaty bodies based within the UN system. Through its engagement with these treaty bodies, BPAPT crafted an innovative model for pursuing reparations for torture survivors, not simply as a moral issue, but also as a legal one, in line with established international standards for addressing gross human rights violations.

Obstacles to Accountability

On February 9, 1982, unidentified suspects shot and killed officers William Fahey and Richard O’Brien in the South Side’s Auburn Greshman neighborhood, a deadly incident whose investigation would become synonymous with the problem of police impunity in Chicago. The officers were members of the notorious Gang Crimes Unit and their deaths brought the total number of officers in the area who had been shot in the previous month to five. In response to the killings, police officers from across the city converged on the South Side, with the search headquartered at the CPD’s Area 2 Violent Crimes station and led by then lieutenant Jon Graham Burge. “Enthusiasm brought excess,” writes journalist John Conroy. “Policemen began kicking down doors.”17 Over the next several days, the lack of restraint displayed by officers resulted in some 190 complaints of warrantless searches, destruction of property, unlawful arrest, frivolous charges, and seemingly naked brutality to the Office of Professional Standards (OPS), CPD’s oversight agency. In the eyes of local civil rights leaders, the Burge-led manhunt turned Chicago’s Black community into a “war zone … under economic, political, and military occupation”—ending only after an anonymous tip alerted police to the location of suspects Andrew and Jackie Wilson, both members of Black Gangster Disciple Nation (BGDN), the city’s largest and most notorious street gang organization.18

While in police custody, Burge and multiple officers under his command beat and kicked Andrew Wilson, then handcuffed him in a manner that left his back exposed to a hot metal radiator. With little concern for the public attention that their torture of a gangbanger and alleged cop killer might garner, this brutal treatment continued even after he confessed to the murders. Burge and others suffocated him with a plastic bag, subjected him to mock executions, and repeatedly electrocuted him with wires connected to a hand-cranked “black box” electric generator—not to elicit information, but simply for retribution. Writing years later, reporter John Conroy would describe Andrew Wilson’s account of this torture as a “bizarre tale fit for some third world dictatorship.”19 In addition to startling the public with its brutality, this instance of torture would for years mark the police as despot-like, outside the bounds of any check on its practice.

Unlike the case of Andrew Wilson, nearly all of the police torture cases associated with Area 2 Violent Crimes pointed to the methodical use of physical violence and psychological intimidation to coerce a confession to a serious felony crime. Occurring four days before the killing of Fahey and O’Brien, for instance, Melvin Jones’ interrogation would be punctuated by officers electric shocking him on his bare foot, thighs, and penis to extract a confession for a crime that he did not commit. A mere 36 hours prior to the torture of Wilson, Burge, along with several members of his “A Team,” had interrogated Donald “Kojak” White. When he refused to confess, the officers threatened to kill him by placing a plastic typewriter bag over his head and holding a gun to his mouth—only to release him from custody after the arrest of the Wilson brothers.20 Three days prior to that incident, officers questioned Walter Johnson and Roy Wade Brown, both identified as BGDN members, about the killings. They too were beaten and suffocated.

Rather than being attributable to the heat of the moment, these isolated cases were part of a pattern of police abuse that had gone on for several years and continue unchecked for nearly a decade. On September 2, 1983, for instance, Burge’s “right-hand man” Sergeant John Byrne led officers in holding brothers Jerry and Reginald Mahaffey in custody for hours, kicking, beating, and threatening them until they confessed to a burglary and double murder. Almost two months later, officers interrogated Gregory Banks and David Bates, both BGDN affiliates, for hours before beating each of them with flashlights, kicking them, and then repeatedly suffocating them with a plastic bag until each confessed to murder and armed robbery. Four days later, Area 2 police drove Darrell Cannon to a deserted section of the city’s southern limits where they suspended him by his handcuffed wrists, repeatedly carried out a mock execution, beat him with a flashlight, and finally used a cattle prod to electroshock him in his testicles until he confessed to participating in a murder.

When Leroy Orange and his half-brother Leonard Kidd each denied their involvement in a recent murder, Area 2 officers beat, suffocated, and shocked them with the same hand cranked electrical device, until they each confessed. And several weeks later, Area 2 detectives verbally and physically abused Philip Adkins before bringing him into the station, where he confessed to attempted murder and armed robbery. In each case, those tortured and forced to confess to a crime they did not commit filed complaints with OPS. And in each instance, OPS officials concluded their investigations by findings that the complaint did not have merit, effectively shielding Burge and other officers from any administrative accountability. During a fifteen-month period alone, officers forced confessions that would be entered as evidence in at least four capital murder trials that landed victims of police torture not just in Illinois prison but on death row.21

This targeted use of torture continued even as the role of the department’s over-sight agency in suppressing cases of police abuses came under scrutiny. In reviewing the personnel records of OPS employees, a local television news investigation found that nearly all had job references from figures either within the police department itself or the city’s powerful political machine. It also found that of some 13,000 closed OPS brutality complaints filed between 1978 and 1982, in only 6 percent had a determination been made in favor of the victim. During the same period of time, federal courts decided 62 percent of excessive forces cases in the victim’s favor, with the city paying out $4,958,503 in damages. Furthermore, of the 435 officers sued in court, 25 percent of them had two or more official complaints against them, as police officials continued to sidestep a departmental regulation recommending for psychiatric counseling a police officer with at least three complaints in two years. With its limited budget and links to the city’s power structure, OPS operated as a deeply flawed police oversight agency, even as torture victims routinely turned to it for some measure of administrative accountability.22

This was particularly true of South Side activists who sought to respond to the 1982 manhunt by encouraging victims and their families to file OPS complaints.23 Over the subsequent weeks, South Side neighborhood groups like the Concerned Citizens and Parents of Auburn Park, the Auburn Neighbors Civic Association, and the Gresham Anti-Crime Program repeatedly met to discuss what had occurred, alleviate rising fears, and develop a plan to secure the expungement of unfounded arrests.24 However, rather than simply relying on an OPS investigation, community leaders also brought their concerns and demands directly, but unsuccessfully, to the CPD district commander, and then to the Police Board, the city agency responsible for hiring and firing police officers.25

In pressing their complaints, these neighborhood groups relied on the expertise of the Cook County Bar Association and the Afro-American Patrolmen’s League, professional associations of community-oriented Black lawyers and police officers, respectively. In a joint press conferences, these groups vowed to conduct their own investigation of allegations of police misconduct and called upon government officials to criminally prosecute officers found to have violated police procedure during the Burge-led manhunt. Both organizations reiterated their criticism of OPS as a weak oversight mechanism and spoke out against the home invasions, random beatings, ad arbitrary arrests that had been carried out during the search for the killers of Fahey and O’Brien. With little insight into the torture being carried out at Area 2, these groups convened a Community Commission on Law Enforcement and held a series of hearings on recent instances of police brutality.26 These two groups would join with other neighborhood, civic, and professional organizations in the Citywide Coalition against Police Abuse and Misconduct and brought their claims directly to then Chicago mayor Jane Byrne. Although these efforts failed to gain traction, they pressed the limits of administrative accountability and would shape the insights of key activists who would later be involved in BPAPT.

A Culture of Impunity

By the end of the decade, the practices by Burge and other officers would gain greater attention, as those tortured into confessing to crimes they had not committed sought to appeal their criminal convictions. From behind bars, torture survivors would seek to win through the courts the redress they had been denied by OPS. Convicted of the double homicide of officers Fahey and O’Brien and given the death sentence, Andrew Wilson would be the first to make some headway, filing a complaint in federal court seeking damages for police abuse. In 1987, lawyers from the Peoples Law Office (PLO), a collective of radical lawyers, agreed to represent him in court in a civil suit, beginning a process that would shed further light on the systemic nature of this police abuse. After an initial hung jury failed to determine whether Burge had tortured Wilson, a second one went further. It found that Chicago had a policy and practice of abusing certain Black suspects, but it failed to find Burge personally liable for Wilson’s torture, complicating his pursuit of a favorable ruling in appeals court. This would be the first of several unsuccessful hearings, as judges not only failed to find Burge and other officers guilty of police abuse, but also resisted efforts to allow the survivors of this abuse to have their coerced confessions thrown out during the course of their appeals— despite the fact that under Illinois law, it was a felony to compel a confession or information by force or threat of force.27 One by one, these torture survivors, several of them facing the death penalty, pressed the courts for relief with only minimal success. Despite these setbacks, these trials slowly began to draw public attention to a pattern of targeted brutality. In 1990, a City Council hearing went further in explicitly naming it as torture. While their legal efforts failed to convict Burge for their criminal actions, they did raise questions in the court of public opinion that would be confirmed by a series of official investigations prepared over the next decade.

In addition to the ineffectiveness of OPS, this epidemic of police abuse was also enabled by the profoundly corrupt practice of criminal justice in Cook County. Even if other survivors followed Wilson in recanting their coerced confession, routinely the sole piece of evidence linking a tortured suspect to an unsolved case, these efforts were often unsuccessful as the Cook County Criminal Courts proved unwilling to suppress them on appeal. For attorney Steven Becker, these denials were less a matter of law and more a reflection of the tight-knit relationship between prosecutors and police officers not just in general, but more specifically in the process of taking and using coerced confessions to secure often high-profile criminal convictions. In 2001, as Becker notes, a petition seeking the appointment of a special prosecutor to investigate these torture claims was premised on allegations that the current Cook County State’s Attorney suffered under a profound conflict of interest. Years earlier, his law firm had defended Burge and other officers in court against abuse allegations and the State’s Attorney had personally represented Burge. While this petition was successful, another requesting that all cases alleging police torture be reassigned to judges outside of the Circuit Court of Cook County failed, even though its claim that most circuit court judges in the felony division had had some direct and material involvement in the Burge torture cases remained undisputed.28

This effort to secure post-conviction hearings outside of Cook County went directly to the obstacles these men faced following not only their torture but also their conviction and incarceration. Indeed, it had become “rare to find a judge in Cook County untainted by Chicago’s torture scandal, let alone a judge who is willing to impartially hear a torture case and to objectively assess the evidence, even if it implicates police detectives, former prosecutors, or fellow judges.”29 Rather than providing a venue in which torture survivors could gain a fair hearing, the local and state criminal courts—the judicial mechanisms of accountability—joined OPS in institutionalizing this culture of police impunity. Even, for instance, when Burge himself had been fired, he retained his pension and continued to have taxpayers foot the bill for his legal defense. Moreover, at least fourteen detectives implicated in the torture scandal continued to work in law enforcement through the early 2000s.30 After years of protests and demonstrations, the impunity of the city’s police had effectively blocked efforts to either win redress for imprisoned survivors or compel Burge’s criminal prosecution.

“No Choice but to Take Our Case to the UN”

At a moment in which Burge and his associates remained, for all intents and purposes, above the law, a core group of longtime South Side activists and attorneys would seek out additional opportunities to leverage pressure on local, state, and federal officials. At the center of this group was Attorney Standish Willis, a former PLO lawyer and then chair of the Chicago chapter of the National Conference of Black Lawyers (NCBL). As the efforts to seek some sort of justice for torture survivors continued to stall, Willis began to sketch out “an international strategy” that took up Burge’s “prisoner abuse” as a human rights issue and applied international agreements banning torture to the Chicago cases. A former union activist and community organizer turned civil rights attorney, Willis had gained tangible experience pressing domestic issues at an international level as a member of the Durban 400, a group of slavery reparations activists. At the UN World Conference Against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia, and Related Intolerance in 2001, this group successfully lobbied for the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade to be considered a crime against humanity. With the United States being a signatory to 1948 Geneva Conventions and, more recently, the 1984 International Convention Against Torture (ICAT), it had clearly defined legal obligations to prevent it. Ongoing media coverage of the Bush administration’s torture policy at sites like Guantanamo and Abu Gharib framed discussion of international law on foreign battlefields, but there was hardly any mention of the fact that these legal obligations also extended to interrogations carried out by local law enforcement. Rather than being irrelevant to domestic policymaking, Willis suggested that the international legal obligations might overcome entrenched opposition and serve as a much-needed check on local officials.

As early as 2004, Willis began discussing how an international approach could be used to make headway on the torture cases with a small circle of advocates, survivors, and their family members. Over time, Pat Hill, a retired police officer and then executive director of the African American Police League, as well as retired attorney Larry Kennon of the Cook County Bar Association would emerge as the groups’ co-chairs. Their leadership reflected not only their personal experience with issues of police violence, but also the involvement of their two organizations in driving the initial response to the brutality of the 1982 manhunt. Journalist Delores McCain, Professor Dorothy Burge, and educator Vicki Casanova-Willis were also key leaders. Regular members included Duane Savage, Shikilia Turkes, Doris Lewis, and Alphonso Jones, making up the core of the group that met twice a month at the Center for Inner City Studies on the South Side. For more than a year, they hosted a series of neighborhood town halls at different venues in the city’s Black neighborhoods, focusing on the “torture cases, human rights versus civil rights legal remedies, the implication of the Special Prosecutors’ report delays and ultimately its findings.”31 In due course, the conversations quickly shifted to how an internationalist approach could be taken up, eventually identifying the Washington, D.C.-based Organization of American States (OAS) as the most immediate opportunity to put this sort of strategy into practice.

On October 15, 2005, this group held a press conference issuing a public call for the Inter-American Commission for Human Rights (IACHR), an arm of the OAS, to conduct a hearing on police torture. With the support of the Midwest Coalition for Human Rights, a partnership between some forty human and civil rights organizations, these activists secured a hearing before the IACHR’s threejudge panel, presenting its own findings and urging the panel to conduct a thorough investigation into the Chicago cases.32 Although the IACHR declined to authorize a formal investigation without further evidence, this hearing provided some initial experience in appealing directly to international human rights institutions and helped to cohere a nascent group committed to reaching “beyond the local remedies and the special prosecutor that was stonewalling and letting the statute of limitations run out.”33 Rather than being dismayed by this outcome, this group redoubled its efforts by committing to press its claims before the United Nations during the months prior to the release of the Special Prosecutors’ report.

More broadly, this core group remained committed to shifting the strategic approach of the emerging movement demanding justice for the survivors of Chicago police torture. Following Willis’ lead, this group “emphasized the essential need for the movement to demand legal recourse for torture and to reflect the faces, voices, and leadership of those victimized by the police and the system, which necessarily included the families of survivors and the community.”34 As such, its purpose as a Black-led organization had less to do with functioning as a racially exclusive organization, and more to do with cohering and advancing a strategic approach grounded in a particular political tradition and empowering the community that had been broadly impacted by the police torture epidemic.

By early 2006, this still unnamed group moved to submit a formal report to the Committee Against Torture (CAT), a key mechanism for monitoring the implementation of the ICAT, the anti-torture convention. In contrast to the IACHR, UN international treaties required their signatories to periodically submit a report on implementation of each UN human rights treaty and its Optional Protocols. This report was to be submitted before a treaty body, or committee of independent experts, tasked with overseeing matters of implementation. In reviewing this report, the treaty body solicited the input of nongovernmental organizations before dialoguing with government officials, and then submitting its own report assessing the state parties’ progress and issuing a set of nonbinding recommendations known as Concluding Observations (CO). After studying the various aspects of this treaty body reporting process, Willis, Kennon, Hill, and others moved to take it up, effectively making it a core aspect of the group’s international strategy and a key contribution to the broader campaign to hold Burge and others accountable.

Under Willis’ guidance, they began by submitting a response, or shadow report, to the U.S. government’s own periodic report in advance of its hearing before the CAT in May 2006. In its shadow report, the group not only highlighted the failure of state officials to thoroughly prosecute Burge and others, it also introduced the demands of financial compensation and full rehabilitation for survivors of torture by drawing directly on the language of the convention itself: “each state part shall ensure in its legal system that the victim of an act of torture obtains redress and has an enforceable right to fair and adequate compensation, including the means for as full rehabilitation as possible.”35 By drawing on the treaty’s own language, this group framed these as the appropriate standards for assessing compliance with the ICAT’s legally binding obligations. Furthermore, the shadow report also raised the issue of the dozens of torture survivors who were still behind bars:

[D]espite the fact that the Convention Against Torture prohibits the use of “any statement which is established to have been made as a result of torture [as] evidence in any proceedings,” (Article 15) dozens of individuals have been charged, convicted, and imprisoned for crimes they confessed to as a result of torture. Several dozen of these individuals continue to languish in prison despite continued claims of innocence. … Questions of guilt or innocence aside, the use of evidence obtained through torture is clearly in violation of the Convention Against Torture.36

For those involved, engaging in the UN treaty body system was somewhat of a quixotic affair. This system was relatively new, with the United States submitting only its second periodic review in 2006. As a result, few local activists knew of their operation and what had a sense of the impact of outside pressure on the pursuit of U.S. government policy. More broadly, there was little indication that this effort would produce any tangible results. Instead, nearly all scholarly accounts of how this system worked, particularly the process of state reporting and treaty body review, pointed to its manifest deficiencies and limited effectiveness.37

Yet, rather than heeding this criticism, this group organized so Willis, and, then, when he was not available, PLO attorney Joey Mogul, could attend the U.S. government’s presentation of its periodic report before the CAT. After this presentation, the CAT provided Mogul and other nongovernmental representatives with an opportunity to make a brief response to their government’s official presentation. “We had no choice but to take our case to the UN,” Mogul would later explain, “so that officers can be fully accountable for their criminal acts of torture.”38 Her depiction of this pattern of torture and the broader culture of impunity struck a cord with the CAT’s panel of experts, and they took up the issue of Chicago police torture in its response to U.S. officials and then its written CO. Issued in May 2006, the CAT’s observations and recommendations acknowledged that

The Committee is concerned with allegations of impunity of some of the State party’s law-enforcement personnel in respect of acts of torture, or cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment. The Committee notes the limited investigation and lack of prosecution in respect of the allegations of torture perpetuated in area 2 and 3 of the Chicago Police Department.39

More specifically, the committee of ten internationally recognized experts also called upon the United States to break with a culture of police impunity by promptly investigating and prosecuting law enforcement officials involved in acts of torture. In doing so, the committee highlighted the use of torture by police to coerce confessions, addressing it as a gross violation of human rights and placing it alongside the use of torture in interrogations under the ongoing War on Terror. Following these findings, the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Chicago announced that it was investigating acts of perjury, false statements, and obstruction of justice by Chicago police officers.40 Although this announcement did not result in any immediate action, it demonstrated the degree to which an experienced group of local activists had effectively raised the profile of police torture, winning its international recognition, albeit in an obscure and little known forum. And while the CAT’s findings did not have any immediate impact, the human rights monitoring process that these activists had taken up would serve as a model for how to go about leveraging international law during the years going forward.

Torture Capital of the Western World

On March 25, 2007, BPAPT held a press conference at St. Rest Country Kitchen on Chicago’s South Side. Nearly eight months prior, Willis, Hill, Kennon, and others had formally established BPAPT at a town hall meeting convened “in response to the public’s outcry and dismay with the freshly-released conclusions of the four-year investigation by the Cook County Special Prosecutor, The Burge Report.”41 During the months that followed, BPAPT held a series of community teach-ins focused on correcting the report’s findings. These gatherings built towards a silent demonstration through the city’s downtown area in October 2006. Following the announcement by former Cook County State’s Attorney and then Chicago mayor Richard M. Daley that he would be seeking to make Chicago the host city for the 2016 Summer Olympics, BPAPT initiated what would become a protracted campaign to oppose this bid.42 Led largely by Pat Hill, a former amateur track and field star, this effort cast Chicago not as global city, but as a “torture capital,” arguing that it was unworthy of the honor of hosting the Olympics. In a sense, this campaign typified the group’s ability to play a lead role in situating a local human rights violations in an international context. As Hill had recently offered:

The Olympics is an honor. It represents peace, humanity, and good sportsmanship. You dishonor the spirit of the Olympics by bringing it to the torture capital of the Western world. You should not honor this city with the Olympics until this city comes to terms with this part of the past.43

At the group’s press conference, Willis and Hill outlined the steps BPAPT had taken in raising the issue of police torture on the international stage. Most immediately in opposing the city’s Olympic bid, BPAPT had forwarded a 250-page collection of reports and newspaper clippings regarding the Burge cases to the U.S. Olympic Committee in November and then held a press conference with former Olympian and Human Rights activist John Carlos in February. Then, in early March, a group of BPAPT members had rallied in Washington Park on the city’s South Side in an attempt to meet with a delegation from the U.S. Olympic Committee officials, only to watch as local officials refused to allow the delegation to attend their prearranged tour of the park.44 After the committee determined that Chicago would be the U.S. bid city in April 2007, BPAPT turned its attention to the Geneva-based International Olympic Committee, helping to lead No Games Chicago, an all-volunteer organization that sought to bring together local opposition to the city’s host bid. Over two years, No Games Chicago would put their case against Chicago’s bid before the international committee’s 115 voting members in Geneva, Switzerland, contributing to its October 2009 decision to decline the city’s bid.45

Willis also used BPAPT’s press conference as an opportunity to remind the group’s supporters how these recent activities served the group’s broader objectives. These included not only blocking the city’s Olympic bid, but also informing and mobilizing the city’s Black community against police torture as “an international human rights issue” so as to hold accountable those officers involved in torture and those prosecutors who helped cover it up. Additionally, the group sought an end to the practice of paying the legal fees and pensions of torturers, pardons or new trials for torture survivors still behind bars, and recognition that “Burge victims are owed reparations,” with one example being the establishment of the Center for Torture Victims.46 Offered almost a decade prior to the passage of the reparations ordinance, BPAPT’s demands helped to lay the foundation for local organizing over the years to come.

Rather than approaching reparations as a solely moral issue, this demand drew squarely on the approach to gross human rights violations outlined in international law.47 Indeed, the concept of civil reparations for torture survivors and their families from the responsible parties is an important part of the ICAT. Rather than simply banning torture, the convention also upholds the principle, found in other international conventions, that an individual subjected to this particular sort of violence be afforded the legal means for obtaining “redress and has an enforceable right to fair and adequate compensation, including the means for as full rehabilitation as possible.” In a December 2005 resolution, the UN General Assembly expanded on this principle as a “Right to a Remedy and Reparation.” Under this framework, adequately addressing instances of torture and other gross human rights violations meant challenging the impunity that shields perpetrators, respecting for the dignity of those victimized, and restituting survivors to their former status. This framework also included the compensation of survivors in a manner proportional to the violation; medical and psychological rehabilitation; satisfaction of the violation caused; and guarantees of non-repetition. Adopted by the General Assembly just months after those who would form BPAPT first took up their internationalist strategy, this resolution detailed a right to remedy and reparation by explicating the various forms that each could take.48

The torture reparations legislation that Willis began to draft in early 2007 reflects the influence of the UN’s framework. In contrast to what would ultimately prove successful years later, the first version was not a city ordinance, but a state law, titled the Illinois Reparations for Police and Torture Victims Act. In an attempt to avoid what was seen then as substantial opposition within the City Council and the office of Mayor Daley, who was personally linked to multiple torture cases as a former state’s attorney, this legislation sought to address the longterm trauma that torture had inflicted on victims and their families, including their continued incarceration. As such, it called for the establishment of a center for torture victims and their families, which would provide psychological and psychiatric treatment, vocational assistance, and community education, as well as the appointment of an Innocence Inquiry Commission to investigate and make a determination on the credibility of torture claims.

Before the end of the year, Willis had split this proposed legislation in two. BPAPT sought to first address the need for a remedy for the survivors of police torture through House Bill 765, also known as the Illinois Torture Inquiry and Relief Commission Act. Crafted by Willis and others in response to the limited gains made by pressing for relief in the courts, this bill sought to create a process through which prisoners who claimed that their confessions had been coerced and had exhausted all of their legal options that could obtain judicial review. Over the next two years, BPAPT advocated for this bill, taking busloads of supporters to the state capitol to educate and lobby legislators, eventually winning its passage in August 2009.49

At the same time, BPAPT’s pursuit of reparations would remain focused not on compensation but rather on developing “a facility that will allow torture victims to more smoothly reenter society.” Based on the Chicago’s North Side, the Marjorie Kovler Center for the Treatment of Survivors of Torture served as a brick and mortar example of what this might entail. Founded in 1986, the center had developed a reputation for treating the survivors of torture from around the world, addressing their needs for translation, legal, social, and mental health services. For BPAPT, a concrete manifestation of reparations would be to create a similar center in one of Chicago’s predominantly Black neighborhoods, providing a place of refuge for both survivors and their families after their release from prison. Over the course of 2008, BPAPT members toured the Kovler Center, using its facilities as a template from which to sketch their own vision of how the right to reparation might be taken up in practice.50

At the same time, the group also continued to assert this right in the international arena, using the periodic review of the United States before the United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (CERD). Much like the CAT, this body of independent experts oversees the implementation of an international treaty, in this case the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination. Ratified by the United States in 1994, this treaty also has the force of law in the United States. BPAPT contributed to a December 2007 shadow report on police brutality against people of color, prepared in advance of only the country’s second CERD review. Building directly on the conclusions offered by the CAT a year prior, this shadow report called upon the CERD to compel the federal government to act against those involved in the Burge torture cases. It read:

While the officers involved may no longer be subject to prosecution for many of the acts of torture themselves, they can and should be prosecuted for related crimes, including perjury and obstruction of justice, committed within the last four years … numerous investigations into law enforcement violation, do not, in the absence of prosecutions satisfy a State’s obligations with respect to the Convention.51

Willis of BPAPT joined other U.S. human rights advocates in raising concerns before the committee in February 2008 during the civil society segment of the review hearing in Geneva, then later, watching in the audience as the CERD panel challenged the U.S. delegation with many of the same concerns. “So the United States had to answer questions [before] the committee,” Willis later noted, “and most of the questions came from us.”52 According to Willis, the failure of the U.S. official to explain away this epidemic of torture and culture of police impunity would be reflected in the committee’s CO, calling upon the United States to ensure that “reports of police brutality and excessive use of force are independently, promptly and thoroughly investigated and that perpetrators are prosecuted and appropriated punished.”53 The impact of these findings would also be demonstrated in a phone call from federal prosecutors following Willis’ presentation before the CERD. In particular, prosecutors sought his guidance on how to pursue federal criminal charges against Burge. After meeting with Willis and others in BPAPT over the course of several months, the Assistant U.S. Attorney impaneled a grand jury, which indicted Burge for perjury and obstruction of justice on October 16, 2008.54

For those within BPAPT, as well as in the broader torture justice movement, there was little doubt that the pivot towards a strategic internationalism had succeeded in overcoming a culture of impunity. The shadow reports and presentations before the international treaty bodies had played a decisive role in forcing the federal government’s hand and laying the foundation for subsequent demands for reparations. In large part, this development reflects the way in which the international treaty bodies like the CAT and CERD can play an important role in aiding domestic mobilizations. Echoing this experience, recent research has demonstrated that the recommendations of these treaty bodies has been most useful as “‘practice props’ which can give extra strength or legitimacy to the arguments and demands of domestic actors when they are advocating for policy or legislative change.”55 Although still relatively new to the process of reporting to international treaty bodies, BPAPT was able to identity this aspect of the international human rights system as a “pressure point” for the federal government. Occurring at a moment in which efforts to overcome official impunity had largely stalled, the Burge’s indictment and arrest in 2008 would pave the way for his conviction on perjury charges in 2010 and his four-and half-year prison sentence in 2011. Taken together, these events mark a key turning point in the growing torture justice movement.

Conclusion

In the decade leading up to the adoption of the historic reparations ordinance, BPAPT played a pivotal role in reviving grassroots demands for accountability and charting a strategy that would leverage relatively novel international fora to apply pressure on the U.S. government. In doing so, BPAPT successfully confronted the prevailing culture of impunity, crafting a model of protest that could be emulated and embellished by those seeking to undo some of the harm that Burge and other police officers had caused. Although often overlooked, its efforts not only offered a conception of reparations grounded in human rights law, but also offered a model for strategically engaging international institutions.

While a lack of organizational capacity would lead to the decline of BPAPT, its internationalist strategy would leave a profound impact on subsequent developments in the torture justice movement. Just days after Burge’s sentencing on January 19, 2011, key members of BPAPT participated in the founding of Chicago Torture Justice Memorial (CTJM). Bringing together artists, activists, scholars, and lawyers, this group sought to play a lead role in seeking to use creative activism to memorialize the city’s police torture cases. Yet, after joining with BPAPT and other local groups in meeting with UN Special Rapporteur Juan Mendez on Torture to discuss the possibility of reparations in the Chicago police torture cases, members of CTJM began examining the possibility of advocating for reparations legislation at the municipal level. Several months later, the group formally decided to seek the introduction and passage of a reparations bill that built on BPAPT’s original proposal.56 With an eye towards “international models for reparations,” CTJM augmented earlier calls for a South Side center with additional ideas squarely in line with those associated with the ICAT.57 These included the proposal for tuition at city colleges for torture survivors and their families, the inclusion of the police torture scandal in the public high school curriculum, and the construction of a public memorial, as well as an official apology and compensation.

Moreover, CTJM would join with BPAPT and NCBL in working with local human rights groups, including the Midwest Coalition for Human Rights and We Charge Genocide (WCG), in pressing the demand for reparations as a fulfillment of section 14 of the torture convention. In November 2014, members of CTJM and WCG traveled to Geneva, Switzerland and staged a dramatic silent protest before the CAT. Indeed, these groups raised points that would be reiterated in the committee’s final recommendations calling not only for thorough investigations and prosecutions, but also “provide remedies and rehabilitation to the victims.” Furthermore, the committee specifically called upon the City of Chicago to provide “redress … by supporting the passage of the ordinance entitled Reparations for the Chicago Police Torture Survivors.”58 Although the committee’s recommendations would ultimately prove less influential than a series of domestic factors—a nationwide wave of #BlackLivesMatter protests, a nimble and multifaceted public press campaign, and a surprisingly competitive mayoral election—in winning passage of the reparations ordinance, its findings nevertheless reflected BPAPT’s influence.

While its impact on the torture justice movement is significant in its own right, BPAPT’s successful application of an internationalist strategy might also be instructive for those engaged in the movement demanding reparations for slavery and racial segregation. Much in the same way that BPAPT drew upon a human rights framework less as a panacea and more as a mechanism of putting pressure on U.S. officials, the current impasse surrounding the demand for slavery reparations might benefit from further strategic engagement with international institutions. Even though there is no language in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights that directly addresses this issue, subsequent treaties like the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, which the U.S. government ratified in 1988, might provide such a mechanism. Subsequent developments, like the 2001 classification of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade as a crime against humanity and the 2016 findings by the UN Working Group of Experts on People of African Descent that the U.S. government owes African Americans reparations and a process of truth and reconciliation might also be used to help advance the ongoing struggle for reparations. The history of the Police Torture Reparations ordinance is instructive in this regard, particularly in demonstrating how pressure from the international arena can be brought to bear on domestic circumstances as well as the indispensable role that experienced activists committed to a protracted struggle can play in overcoming a seemingly intractable opposition.