The Torture Letters: Reckoning with Police Violence

In this unusually structured, deeply caring work, anthropologist Ralph (Renegade Dreams) uses research, focus groups, and interviews with nearly a hundred Chicagoans to craft a series of open letters about the “open secret” that is police torture, addressed to everyone from the future mayors of Chicago to two teenagers he saw being stopped and frisked. He tells the stories of survivors such as Andrew Wilson, the first man to file a lawsuit against the city of Chicago for torture, and torturers including the infamous police commander Jon Burge. He also tells stories of activism: that of Francine Grayson, one signer of a petition put together by the Civil Rights Congress, and the group of young activists who testified in front of the UN’s Committee Against Torture in 2014. He depicts torture as a tree, with its roots in public funding of the military, branching into individual incidents of police violence. While Ralph’s choice of structure is well-reasoned, it has its limitations; it allows for much more emotional language than a typical academic text, but keeps him from aiming arguments at the reader, rather than the recipients of the letters, and therefore from fully fleshing out his analysis. This is, nevertheless, an essential primer on the roots of police violence. (Sept.)