Chicago police officers have long abused, killed, and tortured black people in Chicago. Recent reports of investigations of misconduct complaints against the city’s officers are a grim archive of this persistent violence. Cases include the killing of an unarmed black man by police officers, officers yelling a racial epithet at a black man, and a brutally violent arrest of a black man outside his home. According to research conducted by the Invisible Institute, only seven percent of misconduct complaints result in discipline.[1] But Chicago has also been home to some of the country’s most radical and successful organizing against police violence. In recent years activists have won reparations for years of police torture, ousted State’s Attorney Anita Alvarez in response to her handling of the Laquan McDonald case, and built support for a Civilian Police Accountability Council.[2] Police impunity has often been official policy, but activists have struggled against this impunity—and sometimes won.
Historian Simon Balto’s recent monograph, Occupied Territory: Policing Black Chicago from Red Summer to Black Power, provides critical background for our current situation. It chronicles the history of police violence and resistance in Chicago from the Red Summer of 1919 to the 1970s, a period when the groundwork for mass incarceration was being laid.[3] His book joins a growing body of literature on policing published in the last couple of years, part of a broader surge of interest in the history of the carceral state that has followed in the wake of Black Lives Matter. Recent work by Max Felker-Kantor, Marisol LeBrón, Stuart Schrader, Micol Seigel, among others, has shown how policing shaped American cities, territories, empire, and more. Until the appearance of Occupied Territory, little had been written about policing in twentieth-century Chicago, one of the most populous and heavily policed cities in the country, and thus Balto’s book is a welcome addition to this body of scholarship.[4]
The book takes its title from the James Baldwin essay “A Report from Occupied Territory,” wherein Baldwin argued that the police were an occupying force in black communities, protecting white supremacy and capital. The real frame of the book, however, is the idea, articulated by a black Chicago police officer named Howard Saffold in 1972, that Chicago’s black neighborhoods have been simultaneously “overpatrolled and underprotected.”[5] Throughout the book Balto shows how black Chicagoans have been forced to bear the burdens of policing while enjoying none of its supposed benefits.
Occupied Territory proceeds chronologically, beginning with one of the most dramatic episodes in which the Chicago police failed to protect black communities: the 1919 race riot. During the riot, white Chicagoans terrorized and murdered black people for days—and yet the police almost exclusively arrested black Chicagoans, demonstrating to them that police protected white supremacy over black lives.[6] This neglect continued during Prohibition when corrupt police officers allowed crime bosses to push vice into black communities and operate with near impunity. This politically-constructed crime reinforced “racist perceptions of black people as unfit for urban life” and justified later crackdowns on black communities when city leaders attempted to eradicate vice.[7]
The core chapter of Occupied Territory covers World War II and the next two decades, which Balto calls Chicago’s “punitive turn.” From the mid-1940s to the mid-1960s the budget of the Chicago Police Department (CPD) quadrupled and personnel doubled. The CPD developed new rapid-response policing methods and a more aggressive drug enforcement division. This “punitive turn” led to higher arrest rates for black residents, while white arrest rates began a long decline. More aggressive policing did not, however, translate into more protection for black people. During this period, white Chicagoans rioted and terrorized black people with near impunity as Chicago’s growing black population moved into white neighborhoods.[8]
Balto’s central historiographical argument in this chapter—and in the book as a whole—is that this punitive turn in policing was taken with no significant federal help decades before the “War on Crime” and the “War on Drugs” in the 1960s, 70s, and 80s. Scholars have generally marked these decades as the start of the punitive turn to mass incarceration. By contrast, Balto argues that “[c]ompletely independent of these wars, the local-level policing apparatus became thoroughly racialized, profoundly discriminatory, and deeply punitive.”[9] Balto contends that federal policy was not particularly consequential to policing in Chicago and that federal investment was a minuscule portion of the CPD’s overall budget. Thus, he agrees with Elizabeth Hinton and Naomi Murakawa who, in studies of federal government policy, have shown that mass incarceration was a bipartisan project that began before Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan took office. But he diverges from Hinton and Murakawa in arguing that local policing practices in cities like Chicago developed independently of the federal government.[10] Given the importance of this argument, it is worth pausing to assess it.
Balto makes a convincing argument that local policing practices in Chicago developed autonomously of the federal government, but there is not yet enough evidence to determine whether this argument applies to urban America more generally, as Balto sometimes suggests.[11] Federal government funding might have played a more important role in cities that did not have such well-funded and aggressive police departments. For instance, Heather Ann Thompson has claimed that federal funding enabled Detroit’s police force to more aggressively police black residents. Nor do numbers necessarily capture the whole story. Murakawa has acknowledged that “federal crime policy carries light institutional but hefty symbolic weight.” The federal government might have played an important role in steering the national conversation about policing. Additional local studies are needed before we can know how broadly the argument Balto makes in this chapter extends, but it is certainly an argument that future scholars will have to address.[12]
The next chapter of Occupied Territory considers criminologist Orlando Wilson’s tenure as superintendent of the CPD from 1960–67. During Wilson’s transformative leadership, the CPD became “more professional, more sophisticated, more centralized, less politicized, and more disciplined.” Wilson hired more black officers and sought to improve community relations. Yet Wilson also institutionalized preventative policing across the CPD and fought to enshrine stop-and-frisk and other aggressive tactics that increased policing of black Chicagoans.[13] Following a consistent pattern in the history of the carceral state, Wilson’s more reactionary successors continued his aggressive policing practices but did away with the accountability mechanisms he had introduced, leading to even more police violence during the unrest of the late 1960s.[14]
Occupied Territory is most compelling when it details how activists in Chicago struggled against police violence. Balto shows how radical groups like the Black Panthers worked together with mainstream civil rights groups to protest police brutality in the 1960s. Chicago police responded by murdering Chicago Panthers Chairman Fred Hampton and fellow Panther Mark Clark in 1969.[15] Many black Chicagoans wanted more police protection, as rates of violent crime increased in the late 1960s. Activism therefore often married the twin desires for more police protection and less police abuse. Black Chicagoans started citizens’ patrol groups, crime and police-abuse reporting phone lines, and a black crime commission as they fought for community control of the police.[16]
In the late 1960s and early 1970s, as radical organizing became less potent, black Chicagoans used their increasing political power to challenge the worst police abuses. Black Chicago police officers attempted to reform the CPD from within and black politicians began to break from the Chicago machine and argue for police reform. Still, Balto argues, these political wins often did not translate into tangible gains for black Chicagoans. Occupied Territory helps explain how Chicago became a city famous both for producing black leaders and for police oppression of its black residents.[17] Though Occupied Territory’s narrative ends here in the 1970s, before incarceration rates started increasing rapidly, it is ultimately a book about mass incarceration. The book reveals the foundation of racist policing on which mass incarceration was built.
Occupied Territory is an important addition to carceral state history. The vast majority of incarcerated people are held in state and local jails, so we need more localized histories like Balto’s to fully understand the development of the carceral state.[18] The book demonstrates how political history can be told through the history of policing and crime, and Balto’s discussion of Orlando Wilson is an important case study of the failures of police reform. Occupied Territory also provides a model for how to write about crime as both a political and social construction and as something that impacts people’s lives. Balto takes fears of crime seriously, something that recent carceral state history has not always done. He writes empathetically about black Chicagoans’ desire for police protection, understanding their motivations, even while his sympathies clearly lie with those who proposed more radical solutions.
Balto is upfront about the limitations of Occupied Territory. He acknowledges that the book says little about gender or nonblack communities.[19] A single book cannot discuss everything, but is it possible to get an accurate history of the policing of black Chicago while leaving out these important topics? It seems likely that the policing of black people was inextricable from the policing of gender expression and of Latinx people. What’s more, the discussion of vice policing in black neighborhoods would have been enriched by a discussion of the politics of black sexuality and gender expression at the time, and the discussion of anti-police violence activism would have benefited from a discussion of how black and Latinx radicals worked together.
Balto prioritizes chronological narration and careful empirical work. This has obvious advantages. He never strays far from his sources nor makes unsupported assertions. Yet Balto could have analyzed his sources using a more theoretical lens, thus furthering his claims and clarifying his interventions. It would have been helpful if he had theorized terms like “crime,” “reform,” and especially “police.” As Micol Seigel has pointed out, ‘“Police’ is one of the least theorized, most neglected concepts in the lexicon of reformers and activists today. Historians haven’t helped.”[20] If we do not have a theory of what the function of policing is, it is difficult to know whether it can be reformed or must be abolished.
Balto is sympathetic to police abolition but never explicitly embraces it. Instead, he argues for a structural transformation in policing and society. He calls for “taking seriously the political project of dramatically scaling back the size of police departments like the CPD and turning more authority over them to the people themselves.”[21] The uneasy place of police abolition in the book might reflect a tension between two core ideas that frame the project: the occupation framework and the “overpatrolled and underprotected” framework, each of which offers a different conception of the function of policing. If police are occupiers of black communities, abolition seems to be the only answer to police violence. By contrast, the “overpatrolled and underprotected” framework assumes that the function of policing is to protect all people—even if policing in practice has often fallen short of this. This view is apparent when Balto critiques the CPD for undermining black people’s “right to equitable, fair, and nonracist policing” or for “not [performing] their function well or equitably.” Policing, on this view, is a public good that must be provided to communities in the right amount—not too much but not too little either.[23]
The history of policing in Chicago reads like an unrelenting argument for the view that police are occupiers. In a 1993 interview, the first Black CPD superintendent, Leroy Martin, explained that the function of police “is to try to protect the city’s economic interests.”[24] In a city like Chicago, these are the economic interests of upper-class whites. Occupied Territory shows that throughout its history, the CPD protected white rioters, pushed crime into black neighborhoods, sabotaged radicals of all races, defended segregation, and harassed, beat, killed, and tortured black people. As the CPD became less corrupt, better-trained, more professional, better-funded, and less white over the course of the twentieth century, the disparity between black and white arrest rates actually increased.[25]
The “overpatrolled and underprotected” framework was used by activists who simply wanted police to protect their communities, but the failure of activism to achieve police protection without police abuse is one of the most painful but important lessons of the history of policing in Chicago. Calls for more protection have been used to legitimize policing and to justify more policing in poor and black communities.[26] There is a danger that the language of underprotection, of policing as a public good, and of a right to fair policing cedes too much legitimacy to policing. Even in the best circumstances, the core function of the police is “the distribution of non-negotiably coercive force,” as Egon Bittner has argued. Or, as Micol Seigel has written, police work is “violence work.”[27] Policing can be made less violent but not nonviolent, and the history of policing in Chicago counsels us to abandon the hope that policing can be made just and equitable.
Nevertheless, Occupied Territory also offers us hope. Though many of the activists who appear in the book were not abolitionists, they offer examples of community self-protection and alternative models of violence prevention. Such organizing has had a lasting impact, evidenced not only by the victories discussed at the beginning of this essay but also in abolitionist practices like conflict mediation, peace circles, cop watching, and more that have flourished in Chicago.[28] Activists have demonstrated what abolition might look like, and why it might be the most realistic approach to ending police violence.
Notes:
[1] Civilian Office of Police Accountability, Summary Report of Investigation, Log #1083121/U#16-022, https://www.chicagocopa.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/Final-Redaction-1083121.pdf; Civilian Office of Police Accountability, Summary Report of Investigation, Log#1079542, https://www.chicagocopa.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/1079542_SRI_jw-REDACTED.pdf; Civilian Office of Police Accountability, Summary Report of Investigation, Log #1075179 https://www.chicagocopa.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/1075179-redacted-by-TP.pdf; Invisible Institute, Citizens Police Data Project, https://cpdp.co/, Accessed March 2, 2020.
[2] Chicago Torture Justice Memorials, “Reparations,” https://chicagotorture.org/reparations/; Stephanie Lulay, “‘Bye Anita’: How Chicago’s Young Black Activists Fought for Alvarez’s Loss,” DNA Info Chicago, March 16, 2016 https://www.dnainfo.com/chicago/20160316/river-north/bye-anita-activists-celebrate-anita-alvarez-ouster-with-song-hashtag/; The website of the National Alliance Against Racist and Political Repression, “Civilian Police Accountability Council,” https://naarpr.org/civilian-police-accountability-council-cpac/.
[3] Simon Balto, Occupied Territory: Policing Black Chicago from Red Summer to Black Power (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2019).
[4] Micol Seigel, Violence Work: State Power and the Limits of Police (Durham: Duke University Press, 2018); Max Felker-Kantor, Policing Los Angeles: Race, Resistance, and the Rise of the LAPD (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2018); Stuart Schrader, Badges without Borders: How Global Counterinsurgency Transformed American Policing (Oakland: University of California Press, 2019); Marisol LeBrón, Policing Life and Death: Race, Violence, and Resistance in Puerto Rico (Oakland: University of California Press, 2019); Clarence Taylor, Fight the Power: African Americans and the Long History of Police Brutality in New York City (New York: New York University Press, 2019); Sarah A. Seo, Policing the Open Road: How Cars Transformed American Freedom (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2019). For an overview of the state of the field in 2019 see Matt Guariglia and Charlotte Rosen, “Disciplining the City Review Essay 2019,” The Metropole, December 19, 2019, https://themetropole.blog/2019/12/19/disciplining-the-city-review-essay-2019/.
[5] Balto, Occupied Territory, 1, 7.
[6] Ibid., 29, 37-38.
[7] Ibid., 39-41, 70-71.
[8] Ibid., 92-93, 124, 129-30, 144-45.
[9] Ibid., 4-5, 165-66. It is important to note that Balto’s argument is about policing. He does not dispute that the federal War on Crime contributed to “a larger punitive context in which sentencing policies and judicial practices would send people to prison for less and longer.” Balto, Occupied Territory, 166.
[10] Ibid., 4-5, 125; Elizabeth Hinton, From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime: The Making of Mass Incarceration in America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2016); Naomi Murakawa, The First Civil Right: How Liberals Built Prison America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014). Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow and Ava DuVernay’s film 13th are two of the most prominent example of the view that conservative backlash drove mass incarceration. Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (New York: New Press, 2010); 13th, directed by Ava DuVernay (Kandoo Films, 2016).
[11] Balto, Occupied Territory, 4-5.
[12] Heather Ann Thompson, Whose Detroit? Politics, Labor, and Race in a Modern American City 2nd ed. (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2017), xii; Murakawa, The First Civil Right, 21. See also Max Felker-Kantor’s argument about the important of federal funds to policing in Los Angeles. Felker-Kantor, Policing Los Angeles, 54.
[13] Balto, Occupied Territory, 154-156.
[14] Ibid., 192, 194-95. Conservatives have often made use of the expanded, more legitimate carceral apparatuses built by their reformist predecessors while stripping away accountability mechanisms and social welfare elements. Hinton, From the War on Poverty; Murakawa, The First Civil Right. For other critiques of reform see Schrader, Badges without Borders; Felker-Kantor, Policing Los Angeles; Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California (Berkeley, University of California Press, 2007), 23; Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (New York: Vintage, 1977), 234.
[15] Balto, Occupied Territory, 222-227.
[16] Ibid., 1, 232-235 252-54.
[17] Ibid., 8, 240-250.
[18] Wendy Sawyer and Peter Wagner, “Mass Incarceration: The Whole Pie 2019,” Prison Policy Initiative, March 19, 2019, https://www.prisonpolicy.org/reports/pie2019.html.
[19] Balto, Occupied Territory, 10.
[20] Seigel, Violence Work, 4.
[21] Balto, Occupied Territory, 259-261.
[22] Ben Vagle and Kyle Mullins, “Mariame Kaba Advocates for Transformation of the Criminal Justice System,” the website of The Nelson A. Rockefeller Center, November 19, 2019, https://rockefeller.dartmouth.edu/news-events/mariame-kaba-advocates-transformation-criminal-justice-system.
[23] Balto, Occupied Territory, 9, 258.
[24] Ibid., 10.
[25] White arrest rates declined 88 percent from their high in 1953 to 2010. In recent years, the CPD has arrested only about 14,000 white people a year. Balto, Occupied Territory, 145, 256-257.
[26] For a recent example of this, see Adaner Usmani, “Everything You Know About Mass Incarceration is Wrong,” Interview with the Editors, Jacobin, March 17, 2020, https://www.jacobinmag.com/2020/03/mass-incarceration-racism-carceral-state-new-jim-crow.
[27] Egon Bittner, The Functions of the Police in Modern Society: A Review of Background Factors, Current Practices, and Possible Role Models (Chevy Chase, MD: National Institute of Mental Health, Center for Studies of Crime and Delinquency, 1970), 46; Seigel, Violence Work.
[28] Maya Dukmasova, “Abolish the Police? Organizers say it’s less crazy than it sounds,” August 25, 2016, https://www.chicagoreader.com/chicago/police-abolitionist-movement-alternatives-cops-chicago/Content?oid=23289710.