Epilogue

The book’s epilogue discusses how the history told in the book’s core chapters can inform our understanding of the present. It explains how the modern, massive racial disparities evident in the system of mass incarceration and the systems of policing that drive it built directly from those disparities and systems that local police department’s like Chicago’s implemented decades and generations ago. It explains how exploding police budgets like Chicago’s do and have done little to keep people safe and have, indeed, done significant harm to certain communities. And it shows how modern movements to demand reparations for police torture, to challenge police surveillance, harassment, violence, and racism, and make, as the demand goes, Black Lives Matter, are part of a long tradition of Black resistance to abusive and anti-Black police power.

The Law Has a Bad Opinion of Me

Overlapping chronologically with the preceding chapter, chapter 4 explores a localized “punitive turn” in Chicago’s policing arrangement during the late 1940s and especially in the 1950s. Driven by grassroots pressure from white citizens, the exposure of corruption both politically and within the police department, and the rise of the famed Daley machine, police power and the size of the police department itself both expanded dramatically during this period. Once elected, Daley radically expanded the number of police officers employed by the city. Those officers were also invested with increasing amounts of discretion, leading to the expanded use of stop and frisk and other tools that disproportionately were used against Black citizens. In a department lacking meaningful accountability mechanisms, this increased discretion also led to widespread accusations against police that they were engaged in the illegal detention of citizens and also of torture. The chapter also details the early onset of the urban crisis, especially on the West Side as neighborhoods there transitioned from white to Black, and an early-1950s “war on drugs” that police waged on the Black South Side.

You Can’t Shoot All of Us

The book’s second chapter covers the decade of the Great Depression and the World War II years. One of its principal focuses is the rise of Chicago’s infamous Democratic machine, which emerged as the dominant force in Chicago machine politics after years of back-and-forth tussling with its Republican counterpart. Democratic leaders beginning in 1931 used the police force as a bludgeon against the Black community to try to force it to vote Democratic, and utilized it in other ways to control Black Chicago politically. This was seen most acutely within the context of the rising tide of political radicalism that shaped Black Chicago during this time, especially the labors of the Communist Party and, later, organizations with the Popular Front as they challenged Depression-era austerity and battled with the police as austerity’s frequent enforcers (as in the case of evictions). To check such radicalism, Democratic politicians unleashed the infamous Red Squad, which cracked down viciously on political dissidents, often violently and illegally, setting important precedents. The decade also saw the expansion of a practice known as “stop and seizure,” an antecedent to the infamous practice of “stop and frisk.”

Shoot to Kill

The book’s penultimate chapter focuses on the late 1960s, as whatever tenuous accountability mechanisms Orlando Wilson had implemented were destroyed by his successor. With Black Power and left-wing critiques of the police ascendant, Chicago’s police, like those elsewhere, became increasingly reactionary and flirtatious with right-wing extremism, such as supporting George Wallace’s presidential candidacy and a cell of Ku Klux Klan members operating with the CPD. It also led to an overwhelmingly repressive operating ethos. While public memory canonizes that best in the CPD response to protests at the 1968 Democratic National Convention, the chapter shows that a more representative display of police violence can be found in an urban uprising on Chicago’s West Side that same year, following the assassination of Martin Luther King. During that event, police visited extraordinary and lethal violence on Black citizens, culminating in a rash of police shootings and Mayor Richard Daley’s infamous “shoot-to-kill” order. That sort of violence was part and parcel of a larger culture of harassment and violence that pervaded the police department by that point, and that was made manifest in everything from the “War on Gangs” to the routine killing of unarmed Black people.

Whose Police?

Chapter three documents the cascade of white violence in the postwar era and the often-failing police response to it. During and after the Second World War, a second wave of the Great Migration began again in earnest. As hundreds of thousands of Black people moved to Chicago during this period, their need for housing provoked pitched battles between the forces of integration and segregation. In particular, white Chicagoans routinely rioted against Black newcomers seeking places to live in previously all-white neighborhoods. As they did so, the issue of police protection of Black life and property emerged as a central question for both civil leaders and Black citizens to confront. As white police officers and the department’s white leadership responded to white-on-Black violence half-heartedly or, on occasion, by sympathizing with the white perpetrators, fair policing emerged as a pivotal issue for 1950s-era civil rights campaigns in Chicago.

Prologue

The book’s prologue briefly sketches the colonization of Indigenous land that led to Chicago’s founding and rapid urbanization, and then focuses on two important phenomena within that larger story: the origins of policing in the city and the Great Migration of Black Americans that produced the city’s famed “Black Metropolis.” It shows how the Chicago Police Department’s origins lay not in some vague interest in public safety, but rather in controlling labor radicalism and the behavior of European immigrants. It also documents how the promise of Chicago for migrating Black Southerners was often quite different than the reality that they found within the city.

Introduction

The introduction lays out the book’s key parameters. It offers a framework by which Black communities are shown to be simultaneously prone to being “overpoliced” (subject to undue surveillance, harassment, and violence from police) and “underprotected” (lacking the safety from personal and property crime that the police are nominally supposed to provide). It critically argues that studies that date America’s policing crisis to the War on Crime or War on Drugs are insufficient and that better attention must be paid to local histories of policing. In so doing, it also argues that if scholars and citizens are to understand why mass incarceration has been such a deeply racialized project from its inception, they must better understand how police departments themselves constructed regimes that punished blackness over the course of the twentieth century.

Do You Consider Revolution to Be a Crime?

The final chapter documents the wide range of Black-led activist efforts to reform the police at the end of the 1960s and in the early 1970s. The launching point is the assassination of Fred Hampton, Deputy Chairman of the Illinois Black Panther Party, in a 1969 killing orchestrated by the Chicago Police Department, the Cook County State’s Attorney, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation. In the aftermath of his killing, a wave of community organizations mobilized or expanded their protests about Chicago’s police. This included groups like the Afro-American Patrolman’s League, comprised of Black CPD officers seeking to end police brutality and ensure better police services for Black Chicago. It included U.S. Congressman Ralph Metcalfe using the power of his office to expose police violence and harassment, and the fight for community control of the police led by the Black Panthers. Some activists who advocated for police reform sought more responsive police services to better community safety from escalating gun violence; others, such as those involved in the push for community control, pursued visions of semi-abolition of the police as currently constituted. Binding them together was a common understanding that the CPD was not working for Black Chicago.

Occupied Territory

Chapter five focuses on the years from 1960 to 1967, aligning with the tenure of Chicago Police Department Superintendent Orlando Wilson. Hired in the wake of a massive scandal within the police department, Wilson came in as a departmental outsider, and with aims to reform and professionalize the department and ensure greater accountability to the public. For these efforts, Wilson is remembered as perhaps the most consequential leader of the CPD in the department’s history. He implemented the first Internal Investigations Division and labored to better the image of the police in the eyes of the public. However, he was also a strong law-and-order proponent who firmly believed in an expansive police power, leading to an evermore aggressive police presence in Black neighborhoods that would have longstanding consequences and a contentious relationship with Chicago’s civil rights movement (known as the Chicago Freedom Movement) when it sought to use civil disobedience in pursuit of racial justice. At the same time, Wilson’s reform efforts—especially those intended to bring more oversight and accountability to police behavior—were fought tooth and nail by many of his subordinates, led by groups like the Chicago Patrolman’s Association, the Fraternal Order of Police, and other police organizations that were direct ancestors of modern police unions. In the end, this meant that systems of accountability, while technically implemented during this period, were dysfunctional in actually halting police brutality and other abuses of power.

Negro Distrust of the Police Increased

The first chapter opens with scenes from Chicago’s Red Summer race riot in July of 1919. It explores the cascade of white violence that characterized the riot, as well as the armed self-defense that Blacks deployed in response. It also tracks the ways in which both police brutality and police neglect were features of how Black Chicagoans experienced the Chicago Police Department during those awful summer days in which thirty-eight Chicagoans in total were killed. From there, it shifts in the 1920s, when segregation in Chicago became more rigid, and explores how police corruption and political corruption worked hand in hand to shape the city’s Prohibition decade. It documents how politicians especially used the police department to their advantage, in particular by variously allowing vice operators to set up shop in less politically influential Black neighborhoods, and subsequently cracking down on low-level vice offenses by Black people. It also explores the long reach of police torture of civilians in 1920s Chicago.