Occupied Territory

2019 ◽  
pp. 154-189
Author(s):  
Simon Balto
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Civil Disobedience ◽  
Police Department ◽  
Racial Justice ◽  
Strong Law ◽  
Chicago Police Department ◽  
The Public ◽  
Black Neighborhoods ◽  
Chicago Police

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.

scholarly journals Complaining While Black: Racial Disparities in the Adjudication of Complaints against the Police

2019 ◽  
Vol 18 (3) ◽  
pp. 1028-1067 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jacob William Faber ◽  
Jessica Rose Kalbfeld
Keyword(s):  
Neighborhood Effects ◽  
Police Department ◽  
Neighborhood Context ◽  
Police Misconduct ◽  
Predominantly Black ◽  
Chicago Police Department ◽  
Black Neighborhoods ◽  
Communities Of Color ◽  
High Crime ◽  
Chicago Police

Reports of citizen complaints of police misconduct often note that officers are rarely disciplined for alleged misconduct. The perception of little officer accountability contributes to widespread distrust of law enforcement in communities of color. This project investigates how race and segregation shape the outcomes of allegations made against the Chicago Police Department (CPD) between 2011 and 2014. We find that complaints by black and Latino citizens and against white officers are less likely to be sustained. We show neighborhood context interacts with complainant characteristics: Incidents alleged by white citizens in high–crime and predominantly black neighborhoods are more likely to be sustained. These findings provide context for understanding tensions between communities of color and the CPD. These results are consistent with theories that individual and institutional actors prioritize white victimhood and reflect the neighborhood effects literature stressing the interaction between individual and contextual factors in shaping outcomes.

Seeing Like an Activist

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Erin R. Pineda
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
White Supremacy ◽  
Civil Disobedience ◽  
Racial Justice ◽  
American Democracy ◽  
Legal Punishment ◽  
Black Protest ◽  
Legislative Reforms ◽  
Democratic Principles

There are few movements more firmly associated with civil disobedience than the civil rights movement. In the mainstream imagination, civil rights activists eschewed coercion, appealed to the majority’s principles, and submitted willingly to legal punishment in order to demand necessary legislative reforms—and facilitate the realization of core constitutional and democratic principles. Their fidelity to the spirit of the law, commitment to civility, and allegiance to American democracy provided the blueprint for activists pursuing racial justice and set the normative horizon for liberal philosophies of civil disobedience. Seeing Like an Activist charts the emergence of this influential account of civil disobedience in the civil rights movement and demonstrates its reliance on a narrative about black protest that is itself entangled with white supremacy. Liberal political theorists whose work informed decades of scholarship saw civil disobedience “like a white state”: taking for granted the legitimacy of the constitutional order, assuming as primary the ends of constitutional integrity and stability, centering the white citizen as the normative ideal, and figuring the problem of racial injustice as limited, exceptional, and all-but-already solved. In contrast, building on historical and archival evidence, this book shows how civil rights activists, in concert with anticolonial movements across the globe, turned to civil disobedience as a practice of decolonization in order to emancipate themselves and others from a racial order that needed to be fully transformed. We can recover this powerful alternative account only by adopting a different theoretical approach—one which sees activists as themselves engaged in the creative work of political theorizing.

“The Public Does Not Believe the Police Can Police Themselves”: The Mayoral Administration of Harold Washington and the Problem of Police Impunity

2017 ◽  
Vol 46 (5) ◽  
pp. 1050-1065
Author(s):  
Toussaint Losier
Keyword(s):  
First Generation ◽  
Police Department ◽  
Mass Incarceration ◽  
Chicago Police Department ◽  
The Public ◽  
Black Mayors ◽  
Police Accountability ◽  
Chicago Police ◽  
Cover Up

The article examines the tenure of Harold Washington, Chicago’s first black mayor, and his relationship to the Chicago Police Department (CPD). It suggests that while police accountability had been a long-standing goal of Washington and his allies, he failed to sufficiently address the impunity of the CPD once elected. From the outset, the Washington administration exemplified this contradiction by appointing the police department’s first black superintendent, but one who would leave in place a failed structure of a police accountability that made it possible to cover up an ongoing pattern of police torture and coerced confessions. These cases of police torture throw into relief the obstacles faced by this first generation of black mayors who attempted to uproot the institutional underpinnings of police impunity amid the emergence of mass incarceration.

Negro Distrust of the Police Increased

2019 ◽  
pp. 26-55
Author(s):  
Simon Balto
Keyword(s):  
Black People ◽  
Police Department ◽  
Police Corruption ◽  
Race Riot ◽  
Chicago Police Department ◽  
Black Neighborhoods ◽  
Self Defense ◽  
Set Up ◽  
Chicago Police ◽  
White Violence

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.

scholarly journals Defying the Law of the Land: The Lawyer's Role in Civil Disobedience in Canada

2017 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Ellen Bolger
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Rule Of Law ◽  
Legal History ◽  
Civil Disobedience ◽  
Test Case ◽  
The Rule Of Law ◽  
The Public ◽  
Complex Dimension ◽  
History Of

A lawyer’s role in relation to the issue of civil disobedience is far from settled. Lawyers advocate for values such as “truth” and “justice;” however, they are also instructed to respect the rule of law and the legislature’s role in creating laws and policy. Due to the tension between values and law, lawyers must choose which clients to represent as well as determine what constitutes effective counsel. The Charter of Rights and Freedoms adds another complex dimension to this dilemma because of the fine line between “civil disobedience” and the assertion of Charter rights through test case litigation. It is easy to look back at historical moments, such as the civil rights movement, and recognize when civil disobedience is justified. However, we do not always have the luxury of hindsight, and we must not deny that there are legitimate reasons to practice civil disobedience today. The legal history of Dr. Henry Morgentaler is an example of the juxtaposition between advocacy and policy. Throughout his legal battles, Dr. Morgentaler was labelled a criminal who performed civil disobedience, but who is now highly regarded as someone who fought for Charter rights. Therefore, with competing obligations to one’s client, fellow lawyers, and the public in general, lawyers must chart their own ethical course in these matters.

scholarly journals Revised findings for "Procedural justice training reduces police use of force and complaints against officers"

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
George Wood ◽  
Tom Tyler ◽  
Andrew V Papachristos ◽  
Jonathan Roth ◽  
Pedro H. C. Sant'Anna
Keyword(s):  
Procedural Justice ◽  
Police Officers ◽  
Use Of Force ◽  
Police Department ◽  
Original Study ◽  
Statistical Problem ◽  
Police Use Of Force ◽  
Chicago Police Department ◽  
Point Estimates ◽  
Chicago Police

Wood et al. (2020) studied the rollout of a procedural justice training program in the Chicago Police Department and found large and statistically significant impacts on complaints and sustained complaints against police officers and police use of force. This document describes a subtle statistical problem that led the magnitude of those estimates to be inflated. We then re-analyze the data using a methodology that corrects for this problem. The re-analysis provides less strong conclusions about the effectiveness of the training than the original study: although the point estimates for most outcomes and specifications are negative and of a meaningful magnitude, the confidence intervals typically include zero or very small effects. On the whole, we interpret the data as providing suggestive evidence that procedural justice training reduced the use of force, but no statistically significant evidence for a reduction in complaints or sustained complaints.

Neighborhood Context and Homicide Clearance: Estimating the Effects of Collective Efficacy

2018 ◽  
Vol 22 (2) ◽  
pp. 188-213 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ashley M. Mancik ◽  
Karen F. Parker ◽  
Kirk R. Williams
Keyword(s):  
Collective Efficacy ◽  
Police Department ◽  
Neighborhood Context ◽  
Community Members ◽  
Community Characteristics ◽  
Chicago Police Department ◽  
Combining Data ◽  
Homicide Clearance ◽  
Chicago Police ◽  
The Impact

Only a handful of macro-level studies of homicide clearance exist, and the impact of community characteristics is mixed. In addition, community members are critical to clearances, but the willingness of residents to unite for the collective goal of aiding in investigations (via collective efficacy) remains to be tested. Combining data from the Chicago Police Department, Project on Human Development in Chicago Neighborhoods (PHDCN), and U.S. Census, we estimate the effect of collective efficacy on homicide clearances in Chicago neighborhoods, while taking into account neighborhood characteristics and case composition. Results indicate that economic disadvantage, residential stability, and victimization significantly decrease homicides clearances, while collective efficacy increases clearances.

The Sunset of 1974: Lenny Patrick’s Changing World

2019 ◽  
pp. 37-48
Author(s):  
Joe Kraus
Keyword(s):  
Law Enforcement ◽  
Organized Crime ◽  
Police Department ◽  
Chicago Police Department ◽  
Long Run ◽  
Hard Evidence ◽  
The Difference ◽  
Chicago Police ◽  
Legal Sense ◽  
Changing World

This chapter documents Lenny Patrick’s growing paranoia by 1974. This was a pivotal year—the twenty-fifth since the death of Benjamin Zuckerman and Patrick’s own rise to power. Everyone knew that and, for practical purposes, such knowledge mattered. It meant people made way for him; that they understood he had influence to help in shady business; and that they acceded to his suggestions, requests, or threats. In a legal sense, though, the difference between knowledge and proof was everything. Until law enforcement had hard evidence against him, he was a free man. And by 1974 the FBI and Chicago Police Department had been trying to collect such evidence for at least fifteen years through sustained campaigns of surveillance, wiretapping, and harassment. Wherever Patrick went, someone was trying to track him. He had had a long run as boss of Chicago Jewish organized crime, but the net was tightening around him.

The Techniques of Disavowal

2021 ◽  
pp. 159-191
Author(s):  
Erin R. Pineda
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Public Memory ◽  
James Baldwin ◽  
Moral Standing ◽  
World's Fair ◽  
The South ◽  
Black Activism ◽  
The Public ◽  
The One

This chapter considers the limitations of civil rights disobedience in transforming white citizens. Building on the work of James Baldwin, Charles Mills, and Elizabeth Spelman and chronicling a “failed” protest at the 1964 World’s Fair, this chapter attends to the discursive techniques of disavowal that white citizens and state officials used to dismiss black activism as inappropriate, irresponsible, gratuitous, and violent—thereby avoiding the claims such protest made upon them, while preserving their own innocence and moral standing. In stepping outside the South and the familiar set of events that make up the public memory of the “short” civil rights movement, this chapter also suggests that some aspects of campaigns like the one in Birmingham were enabled—and publicly legitimated—by the very techniques of disavowal that limited the movement’s radical potentialities.

The Turning Point

2019 ◽  
pp. 301-352
Author(s):  
Steven K. Green
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Vatican Ii ◽  
Common Ground ◽  
Public Support ◽  
The Public ◽  
Education Legislation ◽  
The Supreme Court ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
The Impact

This chapter examines the various events that undermined the public support for church–state separation in the 1960s. It considers the impact of Vatican II, of ecumenism, of the civil rights movement, and of federal social welfare and education legislation on Protestant attitudes. All of these events encouraged Protestants and Catholics to find common ground in working for the greater societal good. These events also suggested a model of church-state cooperation rather than one of separation. The chapter then segues to consider the various church–state cases before the Supreme Court between 1968 and 1975 in which the justices began to step back from applying a strict separationist approach to church–state controversies.

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