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Fighting police crime, and the city that covers it up.

Aug 4 2018
The same city lawyers who have previously admitted a pattern of torture under Burge are saying it doesn't exist. They're paid literally millions of dollars to defend the indefensible. As long as the city takes the positions they do in court, as long as the bosses don't really do anything to punish the cops of who lie, we're going to have a code of silence and racist abuse that we've talked about for the last 50 years.

Attorney Flint Taylor rounds up the latest stories in Chicago Police abuse - the exoneration of another victim of police torturer John Burge, the deeply embedded racism within Chicago's gang database, the police union's rightward, Trump-esque turn, and the price of the City of Chicago's denial of its long history of police crime.

Flint's book The Torture Machine: Racism and Police Violence in Chicago is out later this year via Haymarket Books.

 

Guest

Flint Taylor

As a law student, Flint Taylor was a founding member of the People’s Law Office and has been a partner of the PLO since 1972. As a student and lawyer, he has been dedicated to litigating against police violence and racism for more than fifty-four years. Among the landmark cases that Taylor has litigated are the Fred Hampton Black Panther case; the Greensboro, North Carolina case against the KKK, Nazis and Greensboro police; and a series of cases arising from a pattern and practice of police torture and cover-up by Chicago police Commander Jon Burge, former Cook County State’s Attorney and Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley, and numerous other law enforcement officials. He has represented, and continues to represent, many wrongfully convicted persons, including police torture victims who have spent decades in prison and on death row. He has chronicled his work and that of the People’s Law Office in an award-winning historical memoir titled The Torture Machine.

 

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