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Season Six: The Dirty Badges
194 Plays10 days ago
In today's episode, we discuss police that have not lived up to their oath.
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Sources:
Various News Sources Mentioned by Name
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Transcript
Introduction and Content Warning
00:00:00
Speaker
The content you're about to hear may be graphic in nature. Listener discretion is advised.
Inspiration Sources for Episodes
00:00:25
Speaker
This is True Crime
00:00:59
Speaker
It's interesting. well i get ideas from the episodes that we've done like you know more recently.
Discussion of 'Someone Wicked This Way Comes' and Holly's Case
00:01:07
Speaker
And when we were talking to Angie from Someone Wicked This Way Comes, who was covering um Holly's case and and Juan Rivera and kind of all of the fallout from that, I remembered a lot about ah John Burge.
00:01:23
Speaker
And he is a very interesting person to me because he has kind of a special place in history. Had you ever heard of him before we kind of started talking about him? Not before. No, not before. Well, before not before we did some of the cases that he was you know relevant to.
John Burge's Early Life and Education
00:01:42
Speaker
Right. John Burge has an interesting life. ah I'll kind of give you a little background on him. He grows up on the southeast side of Chicago in an area known and as South Deering, D-E-E-R-I-N-G.
00:01:56
Speaker
My experience with Deering is that it's largely an industrial area, but there are a couple of residential neighborhoods, um and Lake Calumet is the bulk of Deering.
00:02:08
Speaker
The last time I looked up anything on it which was... Not like a lot. um I think it was 80 or 90% of that area is zoned as either wetlands or industrial.
00:02:20
Speaker
And so less than 20% of this area is zoned for residential. And I can't, I think there's some commercial stuff in there, like little commercial buildings, but like, I can't picture what they would be.
00:02:33
Speaker
So he grows up there. He is the younger son of a couple named Floyd and Ethel Ruth Burge.
00:02:43
Speaker
So Floyd was a blue collar guy that worked for the phone company. Huge deal growing up, working for the phone company. Ethel was a consultant and fashion writer for the Chicago Daily News, which is also kind of a cool job.
00:03:01
Speaker
So John Burge goes to Luella Elementary, and then he ends up over at Bowen High School. Bowen High School is a very large public high school,
00:03:13
Speaker
Also, it's this it's the south side of Chicago. If you've ever watched ah the television show Shameless, like the U.S. version, those kids would have gone to Bowen.
Burge's Military and Early Career
00:03:25
Speaker
That's such an interesting um explanation. ah Well, I bring that up because John Burge was in the Junior ROTC, which is like if you follow that show, so that's one of the younger kids, not the youngest kid, but one of the younger kids, Carl, is like really into military stuff for a while.
00:03:44
Speaker
Yeah, I remember, yeah. So i kind of whenever I think of that kid, I picture John Burge. So you would have been exposed to like military stuff like weapons and like learning how to be a leader in military history.
00:03:56
Speaker
He had gone down to the University of Missouri ah in Columbia, Missouri. It's ah Missouri's largest university. it's ah It's a really, really cool university nicknamed Mizzou.
00:04:10
Speaker
He dropped out after one semester. So at the time, okay, he's born in 1947. So by the time this is happening, we're talking 1965.
00:04:21
Speaker
nineteen sixty five so
00:04:27
Speaker
That range of time, he would have been deferred from being part of the draft in the United States, which would have been from the Vietnam conflict.
00:04:38
Speaker
It was our military conscription. I know most people know what that is. But if you're a student and certain other qualifications other than just students, you could get a deferment, meaning like while you're doing that thing that you're doing, you're not eligible to be drafted into the military.
00:04:56
Speaker
So he ends up returning from the University of Missouri and going to work in Chicago as a stock clerk in what's known as Jewel supermarket chain back then.
00:05:07
Speaker
I think the name has changed now. ah The last one I went into had something on the other side of it, but it's it's a supermarket that's been around forever ah in the the sort of Midwest area, ah but the northern part of it probably has – It's probably like a regionally ah a regional store that has like 250 locations or something.
00:05:32
Speaker
In June of 1965, John Burge ends up enlisting and the Army Reserve. So he he began six years of service as a reservist, but two of those are going to be active duty.
00:05:47
Speaker
He spends eight weeks at a school down in Georgia learning how to be ah military policeman.
00:05:57
Speaker
He receives some training over at Fort Benning. And according to his history, and like some of the bios that pop up about him, he's trained to be an interrogator during this time.
00:06:08
Speaker
And he volunteers to go to Vietnam to do a tour. But instead he's assigned as an MP trainer and he is shipped off to South Korea. His file gets fat while he's in South Korea.
00:06:23
Speaker
He gets quite bit of like letters of commendations and and letters of appreciation from the people that are above him in his chain of command. so in 1968, again volunteers go to Vietnam.
00:06:37
Speaker
he again volunteers to go to vietnam He gets assigned to the 9th Military Police Company, which is attached to the 9th Infantry Division. And he goes to headquarters and he's assigned to provide security as a sergeant at a division base camp at Dong Tam.
00:06:56
Speaker
He describes his military police service as time where he would escort personnel, convoys, and provide security to forward support bases.
00:07:08
Speaker
He also describes it as being ah the supervisor of security for one of the larger ah area base camps in Dong Tam.
00:07:19
Speaker
um He also serves a tour as a provost marshal investigator, ah which means he's going to have a lot of access to the locals. and to the interactions between soldiers and the locals.
00:07:32
Speaker
And that is going to be where it is believed he he gets the most experience dealing with other people in terms of putting some of those interview techniques and tactics to use. I don't know how the language skills would ah impact that, or if he was mainly ah you know working with soldiers who had translators at the time. So I'm i'm not super familiar with how much experience he would have.
00:07:59
Speaker
But he does earn a bronze star. He earns a purple heart, which means he was injured in the line of duty. ah He was injured in the name of his country while serving. he had He had earned the Vietnam Cross of Gallantry, and that is a decoration that's given by the government of South Vietnam.
00:08:19
Speaker
And he earned two Army Commendation Medals for valor. He gets these two awards for pulling men who had been wounded under fire to safety while himself being under fire.
00:08:31
Speaker
He's asked later on in his career about prisoner interrogation and some of the brutality or torture that went on in Vietnam. That's pretty well reported, and he claimed he has no knowledge of anything like that.
00:08:45
Speaker
um He ends up being honorably discharged from the Army on August 25, 1969. So old. but that point in time he is twenty one years old
00:08:57
Speaker
And in March of 1970, when he's 22, he's going to become a police officer on the south side of Chicago.
Burge's Police Career and Rise
00:09:06
Speaker
He is going to be a police officer for a very long time.
00:09:13
Speaker
By May of 1972, so you're talking two years and a couple of months, he has been promoted to detective. And he has assigned he is assigned to the Pullman area of the south side of Chicago.
00:09:28
Speaker
ah to the robbery division. He does well there. And in 1981, he ends up being the commander of the Pullman area's violent crime, violent crimes unit.
00:09:40
Speaker
And he stays there until 1986 when he is promoted to be a commander of the bomb and arson unit. In 1988, he moves over to Brighton park, which is considered a step up.
00:09:57
Speaker
location-wise it's considered a step up, and he becomes the detective commander there.
00:10:06
Speaker
What we know him for is not all these wonderful things that he did a police officer, which, you know, just laying it out there, if you sign up to become a police officer and you're a good police officer, then there is a, like a, in this country, there's a level of like elevation.
00:10:30
Speaker
We elevate our first responders because they are out there. And for many, many years, I don't think it's the same today, but for many, many years, first responders were able to keep us safe.
00:10:44
Speaker
I think they still do some of that. I think most of the first responders that keep us safe now are largely fire and rescue. That's exactly what I was going to say. um I think very few people from the perspective of police officers are doing the job that we think of with police.
00:11:07
Speaker
think you're exactly right. Yeah, they're largely batting cleanup at this point. And some of them are just there to collect a paycheck and to survive each shift. Not that there's anything wrong with that, but I don't think it's exactly what people picture when they picture police.
00:11:24
Speaker
We are having, i would say that, um, I don't know that it's, and I feel like it's sort of like an existential crisis in the balance of like making a police force. That is what we need almost.
00:11:42
Speaker
I don't know if that makes sense or not, but it's really a delicate balance that we have not achieved. Yeah. Yeah. We have not achieved it. And, um, it's a lot worse than people think. Um, there's a lot more, like I think at one point you had asked me about like incompetence versus corruption.
00:12:02
Speaker
um and it and we talk, actually we've talked about that quite a bit. Like where's the line, right? Yeah. Because when things go wrong, um you You know, there's people that just they're not doing the job at all or they don't know how to do the job or they're doing it wrong, which would be incompetence. Right. And then there's people who look at a situation and they say, I know what's right, but I'm not going to do that.
00:12:30
Speaker
And that's, you know, corruption malfeasance. Yeah. So. um For today, the source that I use the most of um is that of The Guardian the guardian from 2019, which The Guardian at times can be a dubious source. This is a really old article, so six years old, by a guy named Peter C. Baker.
00:12:50
Speaker
And um it's an interesting article that kind of outlines the rest of what we're going to talk about here. And I'm going to read the opening to it because it's fascinating to me.
00:13:01
Speaker
um The title of this is, In Chicago, Reparations Aren't Just an Idea, They're the Law. And at the top of the article in the big banner page that headline articles frequently get is a Chicago police badge.
00:13:14
Speaker
It says, Herbs in Hortu on it. um It opens with, What do you know about John Byrd? On the morning of April 16, 2018, Juanita Douglas is asking her students a question that she's never asked in a classroom before.
00:13:30
Speaker
even though she's taught for 24 years in Chicago's public school systems. She'd been preparing to ask this question for over a year, and she knew that for many of her students, the conversation that followed would be painful, disorienting.
00:13:44
Speaker
She didn't like the idea of causing them pain. She didn't want to make them feel overwhelmed or lost, but she thought, or at least hoped, that in the end, the difficulty would be worth the trouble. It was only second period. Several of Juanita's students were visibly tired. A few of them were leaning forward or slumped with their heads on their desk.
00:14:01
Speaker
Some were stealthily scrolling or texting through Snapchat. Others were openly scrolling or texting. After a few seconds, Juanita repeated the question, do you know John Burge?
00:14:15
Speaker
There was a ragged chorus across the class of no's, no's, and no's. Tell me again what year you were born, said Juanita, who was 54 at the time. She likes to remind her students playfully that they don't know everything about the world. 2000, 2001, 1999, she said, OK, well, welcome to Chicago.
00:14:35
Speaker
Juanita Douglas switched off the lights and played a video. Who was John Burge?
Burge's Involvement in Police Torture
00:14:40
Speaker
Well, the video supplied the answer. Burge was a former Chicago Police Department detective and area commander in between 1972 and 1991.
00:14:49
Speaker
He either directly participated in or implicitly approved the torture of at least, and this is what is thought to be an extremely conservative estimate, 118 Chicagoans.
00:15:02
Speaker
Burge and his subordinates, known variously as the Midnight Crew, Burge's ass-kickers, and the A-Team, beat their suspects, suffocated them, subjected them to mock executions at gunpoint, raped them with sex toys, and hooked electro-shock machines up to their genitals, their gums, their fingers, their earlobes, overwhelming their bodies with live voltage until they had g agreed, yes, they'd done it.
00:15:24
Speaker
Whatever they'd been accused of, they would then sign the confession.
00:15:30
Speaker
And I think that that is something that people miss in the world. There is this period of time, and I think today crime stats and con stats are reflective of the last 20 years. So we're almost out of this, like this um this time where there are unrealistic things
00:15:59
Speaker
expectations of police percentages of solved versus unsolved or what would be known as the closure rates of prime.
00:16:09
Speaker
One of the big things that sort of brings to light what's happening in Chicago happens in 1982. This um this is the first time we get a glimpse of John Burge.
00:16:21
Speaker
In February 1982, there were multiple shootings of law enforcement officers on Chicago's South Side. There were two Cook County Sheriff's deputies who were wounded. There was a rookie Chicago police officer who was shot and killed on a Chicago Transit Authority bus.
00:16:37
Speaker
That was on February 5th of 1982. And on February 9th of 1982, a person on the street grabbed the police officer's gun and shot and killed the officer and his partner.
00:16:51
Speaker
This incident occurred in the area that we were talking about, ah we call it the Pullman area. At the time, Burge was a lieutenant and he was the commanding officer of this area.
00:17:06
Speaker
There was a lot of pressure put on Burge from his chain of command and the police machine, so to speak, in general, that he had to solve these crimes.
00:17:24
Speaker
Also, There's always been a blue line where when something happens to an officer, there are certain things you do and don't do depending on which side of that the officer appears to be on, where you you have a certain type of loyalty among police officers.
00:17:41
Speaker
According to everything I've read, Birch was eager to catch these people that were responsible, particularly for this double homicide of two police officers. he launches a massive effort to go out and start picking up suspects and arresting them.
00:17:58
Speaker
Here are some of the things he's alleged to have done during that time. um The initial interrogation procedures included shooting suspects, pets, handcuffing subjects to stationary objects for days at a time and holding guns to the heads of miners.
00:18:19
Speaker
Okay. I'm just going to throw this out there. We get a lot of people from this time who were building on legacies that had been occurring over the last 20 years.
00:18:32
Speaker
One of those people that ends up speaking out in this situation is Jesse Jackson. um At the time, he was a part of what was known as Operation Push, ah which is also a part of the National Rainbow Coalition. it is an organization that he founded,
00:18:49
Speaker
um and Rainbow Push is still his baby, that was pursuing social justice and specifically was looking at civil rights of individuals, and it is largely considered to be one of the foremost political activism organization, now organizations, with Push and Rainbow being together in the country.
00:19:12
Speaker
um The Chicago Defender spoke out about this. so
00:19:17
Speaker
It's now online, but the Chicago chicago chicago Defender was a very important newspaper campaigning against the police and violence, um but particularly campaigning against racism that was founded by a guy named Robert Abbott in Chicago in 1905. It's primarily an African-American newspaper.
00:19:40
Speaker
um Until it went completely online, this was an important paper for so many reasons. it I think it went completely online in 2005, but it was a physical piece of paper you could pick up at local newsstands.
00:19:59
Speaker
And it provided a lot of inside information that today we get in the form of like Facebook notifications and Instagram like reels. It was the first viral documentation of the police and how police treated particularly African-American people, but they weren't limited to that. They would also focus on just how police were treating people in general.
00:20:24
Speaker
What was happening with John Burge in 1982 also outraged black Chicago police officers. There was a man at the time named Renaud Alvin Robinson who he served as a police officer from 1964 to 1983.
00:20:38
Speaker
nineteen eighty three But what he did on the side is the important part here. And that is he was the president of Chicago's african Afro-American Police League.
00:20:49
Speaker
He characterized John Burge's, quote, drag debt as sloppy and based and rooted in racism.
00:21:01
Speaker
Jesse Jackson complained at the time that he felt like the black community in Chicago had been put under martial law.
00:21:10
Speaker
Eventually the police capture suspects for these February 9th double homicide. And They do it in a weird way where they're basically identifying a group of people as suspects.
00:21:26
Speaker
Tyrone Sims, he is originally being held related to it, but he identifies a guy that's called Kojak as the shooter.
00:21:37
Speaker
Kojak is a man named Donald White, and he ends up being linked to ah Andrew and Jackie Wilson, who who it's believed he committed a burglary with Andrew and Jackie Wilson on February 9th, 1982, prior to taking the police officer's weapon and killing the police officer and his family and his partner.
00:22:05
Speaker
So they finally get a hold of Andrew Wilson on February 1982, so Valentine's so valentines They bring him in for the murder of the two police officers.
00:22:21
Speaker
By the end of the day on February 14th, 1982, Valentine's Day, he's taken by police and he is admitted to Mercy Hospital and Medical Center, which is like a 400 bed hospital. And it's a Catholic teaching hospital in Chicago, Illinois.
00:22:41
Speaker
He has lacerations on various parts of his head, including his face. He has massive chest bruises and he has second degree burns on his thighs. There are more than a dozen injuries that are documented as being caused while Andrew Wilson is in police custody.
00:23:04
Speaker
So during a two week trial in 1983,
00:23:07
Speaker
Andrew Wilson ends up being convicted of the murder of the two officers, and he is given a death penalty sentence. His brother, Jackie Wilson, he's convicted as having been accomplice and accessory to the crime, and he's given a life sentence.
00:23:23
Speaker
They both appeal their convictions. And in 1985, Jackie Wilson's conviction is overturned by the Illinois Appellate Court because his right to remain silent had not been explained properly by the police.
00:23:37
Speaker
who were arresting them. There is some really interesting coverage of this particular issue, ah if you decide to go down the rabbit hole of John Burr's, where the local press and all of the police unions and organizations at the time who weren't focused on criticism of the police, they lambast the judge for this.
00:24:07
Speaker
And they say that the judge has made an error here. Not bothering to point out that the police were the ones who caused the issue. So Andrew Wilson had unfortunately been given a death sentence. And his case, because of that, ends up not being reviewable in the appellate courts.
00:24:28
Speaker
it has to go directly to the Illinois Supreme Court because it's a capital case. And at least at the time, they were taking capital cases, which is any case where you can be executed, seriously.
00:24:41
Speaker
But in April 1987, the Illinois Supreme Court overturns Andrew's conviction, this Andrew Wilson's conviction, with a ruling that his confession had been coerced involuntarily from him while he was under duress.
00:24:59
Speaker
A new trial was then ordered. In October of 1987, the appellate court rules again on Jackie Wilson's case that he should have been tried separately from his brother.
00:25:13
Speaker
He ends up being convicted as an accomplice at a second trial, but the court rules that evidence against Andrew Wilson, which is related to other matters that the police had warrants for and wanted to talk to him about at the time, had been incorrectly admitted at his trial on murder charges.
00:25:33
Speaker
So his case is going back to the lower court for a retrial. June 1988. Andrew Wilson goes on trial a second time, and he is convicted again.
00:25:45
Speaker
But after five days of deliberation, the jury is unable to agree if Andrew Wilson should be eligible for the death penalty. There are 10 women and two men on the jury.
00:25:58
Speaker
I always think of this as like a really interesting statistic for 1988. Did you say 10 women? 10 women on this jury and two men. 10 women voting on whether or not to give Andrew Wilson a recommendation for the death penalty.
00:26:16
Speaker
They're in favor of it. They're in favor of imposing the sentence of death and the two men on the jury opposing. Interesting. So the following month, Andrew Wilson is ultimately sentenced to life imprisonment. In 1989, so that's seven years after his arrest, and it is
00:26:37
Speaker
ah little more than six months past the time he's convicted for the second time and sentenced to life in prison, Andrew Wilson has attorneys who file a civil suit on his behalf against four detectives, including John Burgers.
00:26:51
Speaker
They also file against the former police superintendent and the city of Chicago. According to documents that you can still read, um the court documents from 1989 are still available, they state that Andrew Wilson had been beaten, suffocated with a plastic bag, burned by cigarette, the ends of cigarettes, and by a radiator.
00:27:14
Speaker
and had been treated with electrical shock by police officers when he was interrogated about the February 1982 murders. They stated he also had been the victim of the pattern of a police and city cover-up.
00:27:30
Speaker
This civil trial begins in February of 1989. Jury selection ah happens pretty quickly. The original six-person jury, which is what, at the time, Illinois was using for civil trials, consisted of two women and four men.
00:27:44
Speaker
And it was made up of three African-Americans, one Latino person and two white people. Burge gets on the stand March 13th, 1989.
00:27:55
Speaker
And John Burge, for his part, denies that he had anything to do with injuring Andrew Wilson during questioning. But he goes a step further and says that he also had no knowledge of any such activity by other officers.
00:28:13
Speaker
The lawyer for Andrew Wilson at the time is a guy named G. Flint Taylor, and he works for an organization called the People's Law Office. The People's Law Office, or PLO, is a law office up in Chicago that focuses on particularly public interest law, specifically representing clients they believe are, for some reason, in the crosshairs of a government official or government agency.
Exposing Systematic Torture and Civil Rights Discussion
00:28:42
Speaker
They were founded in 1969, I'm just going to use that to say they were founded in an era where civil rights were changing, and they were largely there to try and do something about that.
00:28:58
Speaker
They were one of the original big civil rights public interest law firms, particularly in Chicago.
00:29:07
Speaker
They start to receive anonymous letters during the trial from a person who says they're a police officer who had worked with John Birch.
00:29:17
Speaker
That person claims that this is a huge pattern of police torture of African-American suspects. And obviously at this point in time, we're in the late eighties, right?
00:29:31
Speaker
It's astounding. It was astounding to me. that this is even an issue because you have to think about we're way past um the point where, ah you know, it had been fundamentally established that you have the right to remain silent.
00:29:48
Speaker
Right. Right. Okay. That means that police can be, you can be a suspect in any crime and you can sit there and you cannot say a word.
00:29:59
Speaker
Okay. And obviously any form of torture, anything, If they don't have enough to arrest you right then, right, they have that probable cause to arrest you, which is – this is something that, you know, obviously has evolved over time. But most of the time before these – before any interrogation starts, there's not enough, right? Right.
00:30:25
Speaker
Which is why you're being interrogated. right But can you imagine the skew in the brains of the people that, and I'm not even saying it was John Burge, I know we're talking about, you know, what was happening ah in the civil ah redress of it.
00:30:42
Speaker
But can you imagine the skew of the brains of the people involved that are torturing someone, knowing full well that in the United States, even the most heinous criminal has the right to remain silent?
00:30:57
Speaker
Yeah, it it it is weird that you would become a criminal in order to make a criminal talk. And it it's completely, it's it hypocritical, right? It is hypocritical.
00:31:10
Speaker
And it it seems like it shouldn't have happened at this point in time in our history, right? As far as like, so because civil rights had come a long way. i mean, obviously it wasn't, you know, 2025, but...
00:31:25
Speaker
but In the eighty s we had come—well, actually, I thought we had come further than we had, clearly. Right. But it is disheartening to hear about such because, and it's ironic too, that, you know, it was overturned because even if they had read him his rights to, you know, them they had Mirandized him. If you've got somebody burning holes in you with cigarettes and elect, electrocuting you and whatever, suffocating you, like, um yeah, you don't feel like you have the right to remain silent anymore.
00:32:06
Speaker
Yeah, no kidding. I mean, even if you did the crime in the first place, the whole point is preserving the process so that justice can be... That is my point exactly. You're allowed to sit there and not say a word, and they're not allowed to touch you. Because if they touch you, like, and they're bullying you or torturing you into talking, of course you're going to say what they want you to say. You're trying to get them to stop.
00:32:31
Speaker
And it completely undermines the entire justice process, just like you were just saying. But the fact that it, and and I'm not saying that it doesn't happen. I'm sure things happen now.
00:32:44
Speaker
But the fact that. I do understand police get a little more, ah i don't know what the word is, but they get a little more ah determined to solve crimes that involve other officers dying, right?
00:33:03
Speaker
That kind of thing. The blue line. But... They can't – you are just a person with a gun and a badge, but you've sworn an oath to serve and protect. And that, ah and you know, unfortunately for them, that includes the people you're sitting there talking about possibly committing this crime, right? Right.
00:33:23
Speaker
Okay. And you become a criminal, and what you're doing is just as criminal as what the person that you're accusing of having committed a crime did if they did it right yeah and it's like they just it it doesn't matter to them they're going to do whatever it takes to get what they want them to say out of their mouth and it's so wrong right yeah and to give you like a really good example before we come back to the civil thing of exactly what you're talking about in this video that we're showing to a classroom oneita douglas says
00:33:58
Speaker
The members of the Midnight Crew are established in this video as being predominantly white and largely being, even though they're they're all white men, they're largely being led by John Burr. But almost all the victims are black men from the south side and west side of Chicago.
00:34:13
Speaker
Some had committed the crimes and they were being forced to confess to the crimes, but many had not committed the crimes. So you have this like different problem that you're getting the same results out of anyone if you're using these particular methods.
00:34:27
Speaker
You absolutely are. Not to mention the fact that you or i being suffocated sitting in there, we would have been confessing to crimes to get it to stop. Yeah. Because you're going to die otherwise, right? Right.
00:34:41
Speaker
and The constant question, we're using electroshock machine that they had nicknamed the N-word boxes. They should have never had that to begin with. Right. Right. The video is going to show us one of the victims, a guy named Daryl Cannon.
00:34:55
Speaker
He talks about it. He talks about it from the perspective of ah being hauled by cops into a basement. He said that he wasn't a human being to them. He was just simply another object at the time, a subject of theirs, that they had done this to many others, and that it was like had developed this routine to the point that it was fun and games. And he said, you know, I was just, quote, an N-word to them. That's it. And they kept using that word Like it was my name.
00:35:24
Speaker
So this is, you know, kind of swinging around to give an example. But no matter who you put on a box like that, that has like a car battery in it that you're hooking up to their body parts and you're sending electrical shock to them.
00:35:36
Speaker
Innocent, guilty doesn't matter anymore. It's just a tortured person giving you a response that you want to hear. Right, and it's absolutely never okay because regardless of the crimes that you've committed, and realize that this is controversial, however, in the United States of America, you commit crimes and then you have the right to remain silent about your crimes without being bullied.
00:36:00
Speaker
Right. And like, you know, the reason we came to this conclusion was not because we need to be just people. It was because at some point people started to realize, and that those people were judges, they started to realize that even if they were the person being tortured, there's no reliable way to know what they would say and whether or not it was the truth.
00:36:20
Speaker
Oh, absolutely. and But see, that's also why once you sit there and remain silent and they gather evidence... Right. they'll they either you know they either get it the case goes cold there's no further a leave or they dudes and see i think especially in this what we're talking about here this scenario it was actually easier just to torture like these poor people right Well, that's what skewed the Comstat statistics that I was talking about was like, you're closing cases, but like, yes, that percentage goes up, but clearly you're doing it this way. So you have no idea if that's real or not.
00:37:01
Speaker
Exactly. And see, the fact that they wanted confessions, and I do understand, and I can put i can sympathize with the idea of how many cases might go unsolved.
00:37:18
Speaker
if it weren't for the, you know, false confession, right? Which it's not solved anyway, right? But when you gather evidence, you don't need the defendant to confess.
00:37:32
Speaker
And it certainly is very, I think it's very unhelpful to get all these false confessions under duress, right? Yes. And i can't even imagine.
00:37:44
Speaker
Now, we said earlier, like, talking about how the... Like, there was an elevation of first responders where, you know, you would think the the general population, actually even today, some some, you think to yourself, oh, well, these are the people who are going towards the danger.
00:38:04
Speaker
These are the people that are going to fight back towards criminals, right? yeah And so they do have this sort of... um elevated status. But I learned, unfortunately, through my own life experience and and kind of researching others' life experiences, that the kind of person it takes to do this kind of stuff is actually not the kind of people we want in that position.
00:38:34
Speaker
I've always said if we could have firefighters be police officers, we would be in a much better situation. And it's, it, I mean that too, because, you know, firefighters, they run towards the burning building. Right. And they get the people out. They save people.
00:38:54
Speaker
And firefighters have absolutely no reason to interrogate anybody for any reason. Right. Yeah. And, When you get to be a police officer, which we've talked endlessly about this, the skew of like, you know, you're trying to solve something and you're going to do whatever it takes, even if you're you've got tunnel vision, you're on the wrong path, whatever, right? You're going to solve it. And none of that is any kind of justice, right? And the type of person, i don't even see, i do think perhaps the military experience
00:39:29
Speaker
involved with John Burke, I think that probably comes into play there. But I don't even see how, like, you know, you take your average rookie law enforcement officer today, they wouldn't be able to stomach that, what they were doing to these people.
00:39:44
Speaker
Yeah, we put way too much emphasis on confessions and statements anyways, like during this time in the world. And I'll just go ahead and tell people my opinion on that, which I've talked about like different ways on the show. um My opinion is that largely statements that you get from people, not just people accused crime, but people in general. Witnesses, yeah. Witnesses, relatives, whatever.
00:40:05
Speaker
They're skewed. to that person's perspective. So you need the statement from the perspective of getting their perspective. But largely, all the people that you think are lying might be lying, and all the people you think are telling the truth might also be lying.
00:40:20
Speaker
So at the end of the day, what you're really trying to glean from statements is you're looking for information that will point you further down the trail. You're not actually looking for conclusions from the statements, which is a mistake that at this time, John Burr and all these offices
Civil Case Proceedings and Accountability Challenges
00:40:36
Speaker
are making. They're trying to get conclusions out of their statements and their interrogations and their torture because they don't know that that's not the end of the road.
00:40:44
Speaker
Right. And it's amazing to me that it didn't occur to anybody that like, oh, every single time we torture someone into a confession, we get it. Yeah. Like, of course you do. They don't want to die.
00:40:58
Speaker
well ultimately, so back to this is Andrew Wilson suing the government. um There's these anonymous letters that have come in. ah us district judge named Brian Burnett Duff will not let the jury hear these anonymous letters that are coming in to G. Flint Taylor at the People's Law Office.
00:41:16
Speaker
So, and and I know you've experienced this, over time, there are motions and hearings where the defendants in the lawsuit drop off.
00:41:28
Speaker
And the various officers, for whatever reason that Andrew Wilson is suing, start to be um dismissed from the suit. If you read it out there on Wikipedia and and things like that, they will say things like they were acquitted. um That's false.
00:41:46
Speaker
That's not what happened. um Everything that you would read in the court documents related to what's happening to these officers in this civil suit is...
00:41:58
Speaker
One by one, they're sort of dismissed for cause because a lawyer makes a really good argument on their behalf that they're not really involved in this. Right, but that's not an acquittal. Right, that's not an acquittal.
00:42:08
Speaker
But... Two officers are acquitted by a unanimous jury vote. So here's how this all kind of rolls out. And there's only six people in this jury, too. It's not as hard to make six people say the same thing.
00:42:21
Speaker
March 15, 1989, Sergeant Thomas McKinnon, he's released from the lawsuit. March 30th of 1989, detectives John Eukitis and um Patrick O'Hara, they're both acquitted of charges by unanimous jury.
00:42:37
Speaker
But... Where the jury has a problem is they don't know what to do about John Birch. So they end up essentially hanging or reaching an impasse.
00:42:50
Speaker
And District Judge Brian Duff, he orders a retrial for John Birch. He also orders the... former police superintendent who's involved, which is a guy named Richard Brezczyk, and the city of Chicago, like all to be tried again related to this.
00:43:10
Speaker
The two outstanding civil charges against Chicago are conspiracy and whether the city of Chicago's policy toward police brutality contributed to what happened to Andrew Wilson and the injuries he received.
00:43:22
Speaker
The second time this goes to trial, June 1989, lasting nine weeks, they let... lasting nine weeks they let um John Burge off the hook, and they do acquit him. But in this verdict of the civil case, as much as they let these guys off the hook, they found that Chicago police officers employed ah policy of using excessive force on black suspects.
00:43:47
Speaker
How that happens, I could not tell you. Why they let these people off the hook, but then find that there's a policy of using their excessive force, couldn't tell you. I would say that it has to do largely with um legal doctrine of immunities.
00:44:04
Speaker
Yeah, yeah. um There are, and I realize that there are, I guess, official sources saying acquittal of charges, but you have to keep in mind there are no charges in any civil case.
00:44:16
Speaker
There's accusations, yeah. It's, you know, they're following... um Guidelines of you know actions of law, basically.
00:44:27
Speaker
And so it's not, in my opinion, i don't think acquittal is the appropriate word. I do realize it's used. I also realize charges is used in civil cases. I don't think that's appropriate. There's no criminal penalty at stake here. It's all going to be. It's going to be a financial ah redress, right?
00:44:45
Speaker
Right. There's heavy, heavy ah litigation boundaries in... what you can actually get legally redressed. and And it's not a lot, like it's very, very hard to actually bring ah civil redress against law enforcement officers acting in their official capacity. It's nearly impossible.
00:45:10
Speaker
And that's another thing that I always keep in the back of my mind that kind of, I think, bolsters these ah law enforcement actors that are like doing the wrong thing, there's a padding that protects them from actually facing any sort of redress about it to begin with, which, you know, and and that goes way back to a woven web that's hard for the...
00:45:41
Speaker
Like a normal citizen just wanting to live their lives to completely put together, for example, electing a sheriff, electing a mayor that has a board of aldermen or city council that elects or appoints a chief of police, right? Yeah. it And those are...
00:46:01
Speaker
it's a kind of a top-down look at how these end up happening, right? You've got to make sure the people that are in control with of the decisions that are being made that are affecting the everyday citizens in this way, that they share beliefs that the community want to have enforcing the law in their community, right? yeah Well,
00:46:29
Speaker
So you would think, with everybody being acquitted and only Chicago being affected by this, stating that Chicago is essentially found to have been employing a policy of excessively as a force on African-American suspects.
00:46:41
Speaker
You would think that the police would be like, all right, we got away with that one. We should stop. Change what we're doing so we don't have that happen again. But instead, they're emboldened by these verdicts.
00:46:56
Speaker
and Right, which is exactly what I just said. There's a big padding. yeahp And that is the padding that Magnus is talking about. So what happens is a lot of people paid attention to these trials.
00:47:09
Speaker
And they were like, hmm, there seems to be something to all of this. It just seems like not enough evidence and documentation of this was brought forward.
00:47:21
Speaker
And that makes for like kind of a challenge accepted by the local press.
00:47:28
Speaker
The Chicago Tribune and the Chicago Reader start paying attention to what Chicago Police are doing. Starting in January of 1990, the Chicago Reader publishes ah lengthy report about the torture by the Chicago Police.
00:47:43
Speaker
While this is happening, they're doing like every other week this massive amount of work. Additional material is published by the Chicago Tribune. multiple civil rights activists and victims of John Burge start to push for disciplinary action against the officer.
Police Brutality and Political Implications
00:48:05
Speaker
Danny K. Davis, at the time, is running for Chicago mayor. He is going to be up for the Democratic primary, February 26, 1991. And he decided that he was going to make police brutality and excessive force in Chicago an issue of his campaign.
00:48:22
Speaker
He said that he would seek an independent citizen's review of the police department. And January 28th of 1991, Amnesty International called for an investigation into police torture.
00:48:35
Speaker
So when the city's mayor, Richard M. Daley, seemed reluctant to initiate an investigation, Danny K. Davis had an interesting way of responding. His response was he believed the city and the mayor's office might be involved in the police cover-up.
00:48:52
Speaker
Eventually, after some pressure by citizens organizations and various like civil rights organizations and anti-brutality organizations around the country, the police department resumed an internal investigation.
00:49:05
Speaker
In 1991, a man named Gregory Banks filed a civil suit for $16 million dollars in damages against John Birch, included three of his colleagues and the city of Chicago for condoning brutality and torture.
00:49:21
Speaker
He said that in 1983, he had falsely confessed to a murder after being tortured by police officers. He said that they placed a plastic bag over his head, put a gun in his mouth, and performed other acts. He claimed that officers abused 11 other suspects, including using measures such as electroshock, which at this point, we have expanded beyond just the box for the electroshock to cattle prods.
00:49:47
Speaker
This suit is brought by the People's Law Office attorneys. So, same people that had two years earlier represented Andrew Wilson, they've had two years to be mad about how that went in terms of the officers and to investigate and to find as much information as they can, including to utilize what the Chicago Reader and the Chicago Tribune are publishing.
00:50:15
Speaker
So the suit itself describes 23 incidents against black and Hispanic suspects between 1972 and 1985.
00:50:25
Speaker
In the suit, they named Sergeant Peter Dignan as one of the officers involved in the abuses.
00:50:33
Speaker
For the record, Dignan is going to be promoted and out. I think it's at about 1995. That's going to be after Dignan. that's going to be after the city of Chicago settles out of court with Gregory Banks.
00:50:50
Speaker
It makes everybody a little crazy. When they do that, the suit's closed off. Chicago settles, and all of that information is not out there.
00:51:02
Speaker
Until 1993, a man named Marcus Wiggins files the third lawsuit against John Birch in the city, and he says that when he was 13 years old,
00:51:14
Speaker
He was subject to electric shock during an interrogation, and he was forced into a coerced confession. I'm pause there for a second. He's 13 years old. Never should have happened. Never should have happened.
00:51:30
Speaker
Today's ah juvenile courts go out of their way. And, like, I get it. I get some kids are out committing crimes or whatever. It's the treatment after they've committed the crime that I am against.
00:51:41
Speaker
I'm not saying they shouldn't be punished. I'm saying it shouldn't be tortured. But our system of justice, the punishment that is used is not cattle prods.
00:51:54
Speaker
It's not ah suffocation, electroshock. All this stuff wrong. Right. is wrong Right.
00:52:05
Speaker
Like, without question, you've made a crime. If they figure out it's you and you're brought in, you have a right to sit there with a smirk on your face. So that's exactly what's happened.
00:52:18
Speaker
And at this point in time, when Marcus Wiggins files his suit, it opens up the police files. And we learn a lot about the Chicago Police Department's Office of Professional Standards.
00:52:29
Speaker
So if you don't know what that is, just think in your head internal affairs. That is the Office of Professional Standards and Responsibility in most every single police department across the country. That's what they named them in order not to isolate officers from becoming investigators in that division.
00:52:47
Speaker
And what the Marcus Wiggins suits ends up revealing, so by 1993, is that in November of 1991, they had acknowledged that they had a request for action against Byrd in October 25th, 1991.
00:53:04
Speaker
This was a common precursor ah that would usually lead to a police dismissal. So a firing. It's like an internal matter. And the reason everything with police departments is an internal matter is so reports like this do not become public.
00:53:24
Speaker
This is the type of thing that gets a lawyer involved. So the city of Chicago's counsel has 30 days to consider what's being said about John Birch. He ends up being suspended for 30 days, pending separation, November 8th of 1991. So pending separation means that it's a lead up, you're being suspended, an investigation may or may not happen, but the the expected end result is that you will no longer be an employee of this agency or this city.
00:53:56
Speaker
So the Chicago Police Board sets a November 25th hearing, and they are going to memorialize and formalize the firing of John Burrs and two detectives based on 30 counts of abuse and brutality, but it's against Andrew Wilson.
John Burge's Legal Challenges and Career End
00:54:14
Speaker
So the hearing reviews the internal police investigation that found that Burge and Detective John Yucatis had physically abused Andrew Wilson in 1982. This is a 1991 hearing, nine years later.
00:54:28
Speaker
And they found that Detective Patrick O'Hara did nothing to stop them. But the suspension ends up attracting controversy after the 30-day period ended, and guess what happened? Nothing.
00:54:40
Speaker
So the officers remain suspended without pay, but then their lawyers sue for the reinstatement.
00:54:51
Speaker
Their claims for reinstatement are initially denied. During the hearing, more internal reports, which have been suppressed by the police department for years, reveal earlier police review findings that criminal suspects were subjected to systematic brutality in the Pullman area detective headquarters for more than a dozen years, and that supervisors and commanders in the chain of command had full knowledge of the abuses.
00:55:20
Speaker
Well, of course they did. They couldn't have gotten away with that. In February 1992, multiple victims are brought in to testify against John Burge.
00:55:30
Speaker
And they end this internal internal hearing in March of 1992. The Chicago Police Board finds John Burge guilty of physically abusing an accused murderer 11 years earlier, it orders him fired from the police force on February 10th of 1993. The other
00:55:48
Speaker
the other two Detective O'Hara and Detective Eucidus are given 15 months suspensions without pay and then reinstate it. So that is like the civil slash employment law equivalent of time served.
00:56:04
Speaker
Does that make sense? Yeah, it does. so there're they're initially,
00:56:10
Speaker
after the hearing, brought back as detectives and demoted. But about a year later, they're quietly reinstated at their full rank. And guess what they get for the whole time?
00:56:23
Speaker
Back pay. Right. So they were on vacation. Mm hmm. John Burge attempted to have the ruling overturned, but the suspension and the subsequent firing for him held.
00:56:36
Speaker
Due to this internal hearing, the city of Chicago is paying lawyers at the same time to defend John Burge with the appeal of Andrew Wilson's case and this new civil case by mr Banks, Gregory Banks, while they're also employing lawyers whose job it is to prosecute him, essentially, or to make him the defendant, we'll say it that way, on the charges from the department.
00:57:06
Speaker
so They're paying like triple to get exactly where they should have been to begin with. Right. if If they even make it there. Right. And they end up hiring outside counsel to be the people who are essentially making the accusation or the prosecution or the plaintiff um with the detectives as a defendant defendants at the internal employment hearing.
00:57:28
Speaker
So they have spent more than $750,000 defend John Andrew Wilson case. And at this point in time, internal leadership at the city of Chicago starts to wonder whether they should be paying both persecute, prosecute, defend and defend the police officers.
00:57:53
Speaker
Right, exactly. And that's exactly where every single tax-paying citizen should say, we have an incompetent group of people running our city.
00:58:06
Speaker
Yes. And ultimately, what was happening with Andrew Wilson is going through the appellate courts in 1993. So after this, he has granted a new hearing. in regards to the civil case against John Burr's by the 7th US Circuit Court of Appeals. And that's mainly because of what's been going on in the meantime.
00:58:23
Speaker
It's based on the fact that during the 1989 civil suit, the officer's defense had worked to like immerse the details the jury in details of Andrew Wilson's crimes. But like they did not respect what was deemed to be a suspect's right to be free from torture and the correlative right to present his claim of torture to a jury that had not been whipped into the frenzy of hatred. So They made everything seem so terrible that he had done, that like everything that happened to him seemed totally normal.
00:58:53
Speaker
um There's a lot more about John Burr's out there. I think that's enough for like today, for like one episode on him. um It's a lot of information to get just through his firing.
00:59:06
Speaker
ah But... they like In some ways, it's sort of the tip of the iceberg or the beginning of the snowball. But he does end up leaving the police force in 1993 because of his treatment of Andrew Wilson and the subsequent discovery that these guys had been operating for 10 years as torturers.
00:59:26
Speaker
um It's alarming. It is a lot, but it is very alarming. And i don't know if you saw something I looked at. There was a gigantic picture of a cow prod. Yep.
00:59:37
Speaker
yeah That was used. By John Burge, even. And I just thought, wow. um It's really hard to wrap your mind around any situation where you've got um law enforcement authorities. thinking this is a good idea.
00:59:59
Speaker
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01:01:23
Speaker
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