Douglas’s students didn’t yet know it, but they were not the only Chicago students wrestling with Jon Burge and the Midnight Crew last spring. In fact, teachers and students at each of the city’s 644 public schools were figuring out how to talk about the cops on the A-Team—and, by extension, the past and present of the fraught relationship between Chicago’s police and Chicago’s policed. Teachers were going down this path whether, in their hearts, they wanted to or not. There was no choice: it was an official requirement, codified in city law.
This classroom initiative is part of a historic, novel and perplexingly under-covered development in the ever-more urgent search for solutions to the cumulative harm inflicted on Americans—especially black Americans— in the name of law and order. On May 6, 2015, in response to decades of local activism, Chicago’s city council passed an ordinance officially recognizing that Burge and his subordinates had engaged in torture, condemning that torture, and offering his victims (or at least some of them) compensation for their suffering. The ordinance is a singular document in American history. Torture accountability—even basic torture honesty—has been a perennial nonstarter in American politics, all the more so in our post-9/11 condition of perpetual war. Reparations, especially those with a racial component, have long been treated as, alternately: an incoherent absurdity; a frightening threat; a nice-sounding but impractical rallying cry; or, more recently, in the wake of the National Magazine Award-nominated Atlantic essay by Ta-Nehisi Coates, as a worthy (but still essentially utopian) demand. But within Chicago city limits, reparations for police torture isn’t just a thought exercise, a rhetorical expression about what should exist in a better world. It’s Chicago City Council Resolution SR2015-256: the law of the land.
If this is the first you’ve heard of all this, you are hardly alone. In the years since SR2015-256 passed, I have again and again found myself informing people of its existence. This has included prominent national experts on torture and torture accountability, Chicago police officers, and lifelong Chicagoans of all races with a professed interest in racial justice. On the North Side of the city—and certainly in its northern suburbs, where I live—I do not think it is ridiculous to suggest that there are more people of all races who can summarize Coates’s “The Case For Reparations” than those who are familiar with the historic reparations experiment unfolding right now in their own metropolitan area.