He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Beyond the Usual Beating: The Jon Burge Police Torture Scandal and Social Movements for Police Accountability in Chicago, and reported the following:
Beyond the Usual Beating appears to pass the test, as page 99 does indeed include core themes of the overall manuscript. While much of the book zooms-in to specific details of police torture against Black criminal suspects on Chicago’s South and West Sides in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s, page 99 pulls back to reflect on the larger context of the Jon Burge police torture scandal. This page appears during a narrative of the 1982 killing of two Chicago police officers by an African American man named Andrew Wilson. Following this shooting, officers launched a manhunt for Wilson that quickly turned brutal, as cops ransacked homes, harassed families, apprehended innocent men, and beat or tortured them to enact punishment and gather information. Once detectives brought Wilson into custody, they physically assaulted him, tortured him with electroshock, and coerced a confession that would land him in prison for the rest of his life. Yet evidence of his abuse, including burns and bruises, would surface in a civil suit brought by Wilson years later. This civil suit helped bring one of Chicago’s most impactful police scandals to light.
Page 99 reveals how Black community leaders, including writers for the Chicago Defender and Reverend Jesse Jackson, employed the brutal manhunt for Andrew Wilson in 1982 as evidence that the Chicago Police Department had long turned Black Chicago into a “warzone.” Jackson “alerted city leaders and apathetic whites to the everyday violence of the nation’s racially motivated crime war” and framed the recent manhunt as symptomatic of routine racial harassment by the city’s police. Local atrocities flourished in a national climate of crime panic, law and order politics, and racist disregard for Black lives. One resident wrote to a Black-owned newspaper, “When white people kill blacks, no one cares […] but let a white policeman be killed, regardless of how rotten or dirty he might be, and it’s a city-wide catastrophe.” Another resident added, “Things just don’t balance out. Some folks think it’s time for revenge.” Page 99 offers specific details of police torture in 1982, broader analysis of the national climate that facilitated torture in Chicago, and evidence of local resistance by affected communities.
Learn more about Beyond the Usual Beating at the University of Chicago Press website.
--Marshal Zeringue
--Marshal Zeringue
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