Across the nation and beyond, the name of Chicago is now linked to police torture. “Probe: Black Chicago suspects tortured,” said a headline in the Houston Chronicle. “Police tortured black suspects,” said the Herald in Glasgow, Scotland. Perhaps a delegate to an Olympic site-selection committee will recall these stories and think, “Not on my watch.”
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The report has its villains. First and foremost is Richard Brzeczek, superintendent of police when Wilson was arrested for killing two policemen. We’re told that when Brzeczek got a letter from the medical director of Cermak hospital telling him that Wilson apparently had been tortured in custody and demanding a “thorough investigation,” his response was perfunctory: he forwarded the letter by regular mail to state’s attorney Richard M. Daley and asked how to proceed, and he ordered an investigation by the Office of Professional Standards. But when no one in Daley’s office got back to him he didn’t follow up, and he neither rode herd on OPS (it produced nothing useful) nor personally inquired into Wilson’s treatment at Area Two.
“Our judgment is that this investigation we have conducted would never have been necessary if Richard Brzeczek had done his sworn non-delegable duty on reception of Dr. Raba’s letter,” the report says. “At the very least he would have removed Jon Burge from any investigative command; and he would have conducted a complete shake-up at Detective Area 2.” It’s as if there would have been no other torture cases if Brzeczek had met the test with Wilson, so he must answer for them all–though torture was alleged before he became top cop in January 1980 and after he resigned in April 1983. “The evidence supports the conclusion that Superintendent Brzeczek was guilty of a ‘dereliction of duty,’” says the report, with its typical caution.
Some of the most quotable language from Egan and Boyle was teased out of them by reporters during their July 19 news conference. That’s when Boyle said about half the cases they looked at probably involved police brutality, though the evidence would have been strong enough to support indictments–if the darned statute of limitations didn’t stand in the way–only in the Wilson case and two others. That’s when Boyle said he was comfortable with the word torture, which the report shies away from in favor of more delicate terms like mistreatment and abuse. He called Burge’s legacy a “disgrace” and said a “midnight crew” of 8 to 12 cops under Burge’s command was responsible for the abuse.
Hobley’s innocence is beside the point–no one’s claiming Andrew Wilson was innocent. But was he tortured? As it happens, one of the officers he claims brutalized him, Robert Dwyer, was the other detective who interrogated Jesse Winston. A second detective he accuses, James Lotito, shows up in the 1984 interrogation of attempted-murder suspect Phillip Adkins. The Adkins case is one of the three the report names in which the evidence is “sufficient to establish guilt beyond a reasonable doubt.” If it weren’t for the statute of limitations, Egan and Boyle would have indicted Lotito for aggravated battery.
