Jon Burge tortured black men for years and his fellow officers covered for him. The coverups continued long after he was gone.
CHICAGO – It was October of 2008 and I was inside federal courthouse in Tampa, blinking back disbelief. Across the courtroom, a white-haired older man, overweight and unremarkable in a denim short-sleeved shirt, complaining of a bad knee, sat in the defendant’s chair.was the infamous Jon Burge, a former Chicago police commander whose misdeeds, alleged in countless civil lawsuits, I had covered for years. Now the man who had once seemed untouchable was in custody.
I found myself thinking about Burge in the aftermath of the killing of George Floyd, as protests have raged in Chicago and across the country. So much of the public anger has been directed at the way police for decades have covered up their worst behavior and blocked efforts to reform. And I also heard people try to explain away killings of black people by police as isolated incidents, not evidence of patterns of racist behavior that had endured over decades.
The detectives were part of the so-called “midnight crew,” a group of cops who took orders from Burge, a burly, fierce-eyed Vietnam vet who had joined the department in 1970 and risen to control the Area 2 district on the South Side of the city, an area historically plagued with crime and gang warfare. Burge’s solve rate was celebrated within the department.
Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot, a former federal prosecutor and defense attorney who headed the Chicago Police Board, the department’s civilian oversight body, and chaired the Chicago Police Accountability Task Force, noted the significance of Burge’s expulsion from the force. “At that time, the firing of a police commander was essentially unheard of,” she said this week in an interview with POLITICO.
Prosecutors put victims on the stand to describe the torture. But even then the case hit a snag: The first officer to ever crack and testify against Burge in front of a grand jury backtracked in the public trial. It was a video, of course, that led to murder charge against the Minneapolis officer. The initial account of George Floyd’s death by police officials said Floyd had died of a medical condition, making no mention that an officer had pressed his knee on Floyd’s neck for nearly nine minutes. An initial police account in Buffalo, New York said a protester was injured after he tripped and fell.
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