CHICAGO, May 16 (Sputnik) – Torture at the Chicago Police Department (CPD) is regularly reported to the Cook County Public Defender's Office, the county's Assistant Public Defender Erica Greene told Sputnik.
"I'm not happy about it [torture], and I hear about it all the time from my clients," Greene said to Sputnik on Saturday. "We need more video [evidence], and I hope we will have more interrogations and arrests on video."
The most recent video in the Chicago police torture scandal emerged last Friday, showing a CPD detainee, Angel Perez, being led into a secret interrogation facility at an abandoned warehouse in Chicago's West Side. Perez accused the police of sexually assaulting him in order to coerce him into setting up a meeting with a local drug dealer under investigation.
Burge and officers under his command gained national notoriety after it was revealed that they had severely abused prisoners in their custody to coerce them into confessing all sort of crime over almost three decades. Burge was fired in 1993 for lying about police brutality. He spent four years living in a halfway house but was never formally charged with torture.
Greene said Chicago police confessions were notoriously unreliable as detainees would confess to anything just to stop the torture.
She added that Chicago police often have to make split decisions when detaining or arresting someone, and that racial profiling continues within policing because there is less chance of a jury believing an African-American or Hispanic-American defendant over the Chicago police.
"I don't think it's coincidental that most people in [Chicago] jails are black and Latino," Greene said. "Of course, then, historically, they live in the areas where there's been more crime, which will be argued."
Greene concludes that the Chicago detainees' awareness of their civil rights always helps, and that with knowledge being power, more people need to know that they don't have to speak to Chicago police if they do not want to.
Earlier in May, the Chicago City Council approved $5.5 million in reparations for some 80 survivors of police torture at the hands of Jon Burge and his team. Most of the victims were African-American.
