AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now! I’m Amy Goodman, with Juan González.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Well, we spend the rest of the hour in Chicago, where the Illinois Supreme Court has let stand a less than 7-year prison sentence for former police officer Jason Van Dyke, who was found guilty last year of second-degree murder for killing African-American teenager Laquan McDonald in 2014. The Illinois Supreme Court denied a request by the state’s attorney general to resentence Van Dyke on Tuesday. Van Dyke, who is white, was found guilty on 16 counts of aggravated battery—one count for each of the 16 bullets he fired at McDonald. Illinois Attorney General Kwame Raoul petitioned the state Supreme Court to vacate Van Dyke’s second-degree murder sentence and instead impose a sentence on each of the 16 counts. If the petition had been granted, Van Dyke could have faced to up 96 years in prison.

The news that Van Dyke will not be resentenced has sparked criticism throughout Chicago. The city’s mayoral candidates, who are both African-American women, have spoken out against the decision. Lori Lightfoot, the front-runner in the race, tweeted, quote, “Today’s ruling is the latest disappointment in the Jason Van Dyke sentencing, and a sad reminder of the work we must do to create a system that is free of institutional racism and truly holds police accountable for their misconduct, including criminal acts. We cannot build trust between police and the communities they serve if officers who commit crimes are not held to the same standards as [other defendants].” Lightfoot and her opponent, Cook County Board President Toni Preckwinkle, both have vowed to reform Chicago’s Police Department. Van Dyke is the first Chicago police officer to be sentenced for an on-duty shooting in half a century.

AMY GOODMAN: The decision is the latest in the struggle by activists, lawyers, journalists to hold the Chicago Police Department accountable for its long history of violence against the city’s citizens, particularly African-American men. Much of that history is chronicled in a new book by a leading Chicago lawyer fighting police torture. The Torture Machine: Racism and Police Violence in Chicago exposes decades of corruption and cover-ups in the Chicago Police Department, from the murder of Black Panther leader Fred Hampton and Mark Clark to the reign of torture overseen by Commander Jon Burge. Under Burge’s reign, from 1972 to ’91, more than 200 people, most of them African-American, were tortured with tactics including electric shock and suffocation.

We’re joined now by the book’s author, Flint Taylor, an attorney with People’s Law Office who has represented survivors of police torture in Chicago for more than 25 years.

Flint, welcome back to Democracy Now! Why did you name your book The Torture Machine?

FLINT TAYLOR: Well, thank you, Amy and Juan. It’s a pleasure to be back with you.

I named it The Torture Machine for two different but related reasons. First of all is rather obvious. On the cover, the torture machine, that was the electric shock box that the notorious Commander Jon Burge and his men used on many African-American suspects over that 20-year period that you just mentioned. But also “the torture machine” refers to Chicago’s machine, the notorious political machine, often known as the Daley machine and the Democratic machine, here in the city, which not only countenanced this torture, covered it up, but also was involved at the highest levels of the police department and, yes, the State’s Attorney’s Office, when Richard M. Daley was the state’s attorney of Cook County—were involved in this conspiracy, this scandal, that has gone on for so many decades in this city.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Well, Flint, I want to, first, congratulate you on the book. It is really a riveting account. It’s almost a forensic analysis of decades of collusion between judges, politicians, prosecutors and the police to basically engage in systemic human rights violation. But you start the book with an incident that, for many young people today, is not even part of history, but it’s not often covered history. And you make the statement that the killing of Fred Hampton and Mark Clark really was a seminal moment in the development of Chicago, in the modern history of Chicago. And I’m wondering if you could first give us a sense of why you believe that’s so, and then we’re going to do a clip of a documentary, from The Weather Underground, about that, the house where Fred Hampton was killed.

FLINT TAYLOR: Yes. On December 4th, 1969, 14 Chicago police officers working under the control of the state’s attorney of Cook County—at that time, Edward Hanrahan—raided a West Side apartment where Black Panthers were sleeping. And one of those Black Panthers was the chairman of the Black Panther Party, Fred Hampton, a charismatic young leader, who was targeted not only by the police, but by, it turns out, the FBI. And that raid, which was covered up, was claimed to be at first a shootout, was later shown to be a total shoot-in. And then, over the years, as we and others were able to litigate a case in federal court, we were able to show not only that this was a vicious, racist attack on the Panthers and its leadership, where two men were killed and many others wounded, but it was part and parcel of the FBI’s COINTELPRO program, the counterintelligence program devised and implemented by J. Edgar Hoover over the years, which in the late ’60s targeted the Black Panther Party, and specifically Fred Hampton in Chicago, and, in fact, that the raid on the apartment was part of this COINTELPRO program.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, of course, you make the point in your book that that was the beginning of the resistance, mass resistance, of the black community, that eventually led to the election of Harold Washington as the first black mayor of Chicago. But I want to turn to the clip from the documentary The Weather Underground about the murder of Black Panther Fred Hampton nearly 50 years ago, on December 4th, 1969. This clip begins with Fred Hampton.

FRED HAMPTON: So we say—we always say in the Black Panther Party that they can do anything they want to to us. We might not be back. I might be in jail. I might be anywhere. But when I leave, you’ll remember I said, with the last words on my lips, that I am a revolutionary.

WALTER CRONKITE: In Chicago today, two Black Panthers were killed as police raided a Panther stronghold. Police arrived at Fred Hampton’s West Side apartment at 4:45 this morning. They had a search warrant authorizing them to look for illegal weapons. The State’s Attorney’s Office says that Hampton and another man were killed in the 15-minute gun battle which followed.

BOBBY RUSH: The pigs murdered Deputy Chairman Fred Hampton while he lay in bed. Their lies, their oinking to the people won’t—can’t bear up to the evidence that we have that they murdered our deputy chairman in cold blood as he lay in his bed asleep.

BERNARDINE DOHRN: The Panther Party organized tours of the apartment that they were in when they were murdered, and I went with a group of people from the SDS national office, which is a couple of blocks away.

BLACK PANTHER TOUR GUIDE: Don’t touch nothing. Don’t move nothing, because we want to keep everything just the way it is.

BERNARDINE DOHRN: It was a scene of carnage. It was a scene of war. You see this door ridden with bullets, not little bullet holes, but shattered.

BLACK PANTHER TOUR GUIDE: The room where first brother Mark Clark was murdered at.

BERNARDINE DOHRN: You walk through a living room into the bedroom, and there’s a mattress soaked in his blood, red blood down the floor.

SKIP ANDREW: Anyone who went through that apartment and examined the evidence that was remaining there could come to only one conclusion, and that is that Fred Hampton, 21 years old and a member of a militant, well-known militant group, was murdered in his bed probably as he lay asleep.

THOMAS STRIETER: This blatant act of legitimatized murder strips all credibility from law enforcement. In the context of other acts against militant blacks in recent months, it suggests an official policy of systematic repression.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: That was from the documentary The Weather Underground, directed by Sam Green and Bill Siegel. And so, Flint, the reality was, as you document in your book, that this was actually a direct assassination and that there was a long struggle, on your part, to—because you were there. You were able to get to the house the very day that Hampton was killed. Could you talk about this conspiracy to kill one of the rising radical leaders of the black community?

FLINT TAYLOR: Well, we see now—and it was uncovered during our trial in the ’70s—that the COINTELPRO program targeted black liberation organizations and leaders. And they specifically named targets—Dr. King, Stokely Carmichael, Rap Brown, Elijah Muhammad—and pointed to Malcolm X, as well. And as the Panthers rose and became powerful, first in Oakland and later in Chicago—as you can see from the clip what a charismatic, young leader, at 21, Fred Hampton was—Hoover and his people focused on the Black Panther Party and, specifically in Chicago, on Fred Hampton.

They had an informant in the Black Panther Party by the name of William O’Neal. He sketched out a floor plan that showed where Hampton would be sleeping. They went to the apartment. They supplied that floor plan to the police—the FBI did. They went to the apartment in the early-morning hours. And Fred was asleep. It appeared that he had been drugged by O’Neal or some other agent. And he was murdered in his bed.

Over the years, we uncovered documents that showed this floor plan. That was all covered up, as well. It showed that the FBI took credit for this raid as part of its COINTELPRO program. And it showed even that O’Neal, after the raid, was given by Hoover and the people in Chicago a $300 bonus, what we later called the “30 pieces of silver” for the informant, O’Neal, for setting up the raid. So, he was receiving from Hoover a bonus for the success of the raid at the same time he was serving as a pallbearer in Fred Hampton’s funeral.

AMY GOODMAN: Flint Taylor, you pursued this case civilly for 13 years. What came out of it?

FLINT TAYLOR: Well, a lot of what I’ve just mentioned came out of it. The narrative shifted over the years, thanks to the community, thanks to the Panthers and thanks to the lawsuit that we filed. And as you could hear from the clip, the position that the police took—and they thought they were going to get away with scot-free—was that this was a shootout, that these were vicious Black Panthers, all of that. Well, because we and the Panthers went to that apartment, we were able to show that it was a shoot-in. We were able to change the narrative to the fact that it was an unjustified and violent shoot-in by the police. But over the years, as we were able to join the FBI in the case, we were able to uncover these FBI documents that showed that, yes, it was not just a murder, it was not just a shoot-in, but it was an assassination. It was a political assassination straight from Washington and the FBI.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Flint, very shortly after the murder of Fred Hampton, you got involved in another case of the Wilson brothers, and which began the uncovering of the Jon Burge scandal, that, again, would take you decades, really, to finally get some measure of justice. Could you talk about that, the Wilson case?

FLINT TAYLOR: Yes. The Wilson case arose in February of 1982. Two white police officers were shot and killed. The two black perpetrators had escaped. And the city of Chicago, under Jane Byrne and Police Superintendent Brzeczek, set out on the most vicious and terroristic manhunt in the history of the city. They terrorized the black community. They kicked in doors. They dragged people out of their houses. If they thought that they had some information about the killings, they tortured them. They tortured them with suffocation. They tortured them with all kinds of medieval types of torture. They finally found the two people who the eyewitness identified as the persons who were involved in the crime. And the person who was identified as the shooter was Andrew Wilson.

Andrew Wilson was taken back to the police headquarters on the South Side of Chicago. And this notorious commander, who at that time was a lieutenant in charge of the manhunt, by the name of Jon Burge, led a torture of Andrew Wilson that included electric shock with the torture machine, that is mentioned and depicted in my book, and suffocation with a bag. They handcuffed him across an old, ribbed steam radiator and electric-shocked him so that he was burned across his chest. And they also burned him with cigarettes, beat him and got a confession from him.

This came out at that time, but nobody really cared. The state’s attorney of Cook County, Richard Daley, was informed specifically by a doctor and the police superintendent about this torture, and he chose to do nothing about it. Because he did nothing about it, Burge was able to, in the next 10 years, torture another 75 individuals—all African-American men.

And a few years after that, Andrew Wilson, who had been sentenced to death, filed a pro se complaint in federal court challenging his torture and suing Burge. That’s how we got involved. During his trial, an anonymous police source, who we later dubbed as “Deep Badge,” started to give me information that laid out exactly the map of what had happened, the systemic nature of the torture, the fact that Daley and his surrogates were involved, that the police superintendent, that the mayor were all involved.

And we followed that map, basically, for the next 20, 30 years, even as we sit here today, to uncover evidence that supported the idea that this was a systemic torture. This was something that sent people to death row. This was something that convicted innocent people. And, ultimately, all of this led to Burge’s firing. It led to, many, many years later, his conviction for obstruction of justice for lying about the torture. And, of course, it led to the remarkable reparations that the city of Chicago granted to the survivors of police torture and their families here a couple of years ago.

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now! I’m Amy Goodman, with Juan González.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: We continue to look at the long history of police brutality in Chicago, now turning to an often-overlooked and underreported issue, police abuse of Latinos. Latinos, and especially immigrants, have faced police conflict, violence and even killings, for decades, and have a long history of fighting back against brutality through community organizing and activism. But the violent policing of Latinos has received little news coverage.

AMY GOODMAN: We’re joined now by a historian who has chronicled the police mistreatment of Latinos in Chicago. Lilia Fernández is a professor of history and Latino studies at Rutgers University in New Jersey. She’s the author of Brown in the Windy City: Mexicans and Puerto Ricans in Postwar Chicago. She also happens to be married to Juan, our co-host Juan González. Still with us, Flint Taylor, attorney with People’s Law Office, who has represented survivors of police torture in Chicago for nearly half a century. His new book, The Torture Machine: Racism and Police Violence in Chicago.

Professor Fernández, it’s great to have you with us. Can you talk about how the torture machine, dealing with racism and police violence in Chicago, the significance of it, and the work that you have done highlighting the brutality against the Latino community in Chicago—in Chicago, so often seen, police brutality, as a black-and-white issue?

LILIA FERNÁNDEZ: Yes. Thank you so much, Amy and Juan.

First, let me start by commending Flint Taylor for this really incredible account of decades of fighting against the brutality of the Burge—Jon Burge—torture machine and trying to seek justice, particularly for many men who were wrongfully convicted on the basis of confessions extracted by torture.

But, yes, one of the things that a lot of people don’t realize, I think, because police abuse and brutality often does get framed within a black-and-white racial framing, is the fact that Latinos were very frequently the victims of police misconduct, abuse, brutality, throughout these same years that Flint covers. Going back to the 1960s, when Mexicans and Puerto Ricans first started arriving in the city, I was actually very surprised when I started to uncover cases of different Puerto Rican and, to a less extent, Mexican-American men who were having violent encounters with police officers. And in fact, for example, the Division Street riots, which not many people know of, which happened in the summer of 1966, were set off by a white police officer who had shot a young Puerto Rican man named Arcelis Cruz. Once the community learned of this, people started pouring out into the streets. And they did so not because this was a unique or unprecedented event, but because people were really fed up, as in the case with many other urban riots in the 1960s. People were really fed up with the repeated mistreatment and abuse and brutality that they experienced at the hands of local law enforcement.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Well, I think, Lilia, one of the points that you make—and I’d like Flint to comment on this—that police corruption and police abuse often go hand in hand. And the Chicago Police Department had a notorious reputation for corruption. As, Lilia, you mention in the book, between 1972 and 1982 there were five separate mass arrests of police for corruption, including at one point more than 50 cops that were arrested and indicted for corruption. Flint, this whole issue of the culture of corruption within urban police departments, especially those that are focused on largely minority communities?

FLINT TAYLOR: Yes. And I want to say that at the same time that we were dealing with the Fred Hampton case, that there was the murder, the police murder, of Manuel Ramos in the city of Chicago, which the Young Lords and others stepped forward to protest very strongly in 1969. So, what Lilia is saying is certainly true, and what she’s written about certainly is very important.

The corruption of the Chicago Police Department goes all the way back to Haymarket. It goes all the way back to Pullman. It goes through the Summerdale scandal and the Marquette 10. And corruption does go hand in hand with brutality and violence, because, of course, they’ve been able to get away with it. It’s been part of the culture, along with the code of silence, along with the systemic racism that is so prevalent in the Chicago Police Department. And so, when you have not only the department and its higher-ups countenancing this, being involved in it, as well, but you have the prosecutors who look the other way and who are involved in it, and then, ultimately, you have the judiciary, you have the judges—and you have the judges, who I’ve documented in my book, who were former prosecutors, who give passes to police officers. Most recently, in the Laquan McDonald case, the former prosecutor, the judge, who I knew from taking a tortured confession of a 13-year-old in a case of mine, she acquitted the three officers who covered up the Laquan McDonald video and lied about it.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Lilia, on the issue of one of the cases that you mentioned—didn’t happen in Chicago but in a nearby suburb—the Rolando Cruz case, could you talk about that, as well? Because Flint mentions it in his book, as well.

LILIA FERNÁNDEZ: Sure, right. The Rolando Cruz case is not one that I researched myself, but I actually remember being contacted by his attorney, whose name I’m forgetting right now, but she was representing him in the early ’90s when they were trying to get his conviction overturned. He had been accused of killing—raping and brutally murdering a 10-year-old girl—he and two other co-defendants. The other was Alejandro Hernandez, and a third man. And he was convicted, sent to prison, spent 10 years in prison.

And I remember I was in college at the time, and his attorney reached out to me and asked if I could help bring an exhibit of Rolando Cruz’s artwork to Harvard University. And I did. But I had no idea at the time the significance of Cruz’s case, that it was not just an individual, isolated incident, but in fact that there was this widespread pattern of police abuse, particularly with African Americans and Latinos, not only in the city, but the whole metropolitan area.

AMY GOODMAN: And—

LILIA FERNÁNDEZ: The—go ahead, Amy.

AMY GOODMAN: Can you talk, Lilia, about not only what’s happening with police in the Latinx community in Chicago, but also dealing with undocumented immigrants and Border Patrol and ICE?

LILIA FERNÁNDEZ: Right. I think one of the things that activists are starting to realize is they’re making the connections between police abuse and law enforcement brutality against African Americans and minority communities in urban areas, in particular, and the larger, you know, immigration enforcement apparatus, that has similarly committed all kinds of acts of brutality and violence historically.

In the 1970s, for example, there was a huge case, which got very little media attention but which really galvanized the Mexican-American community, much like the murder of Manuel Ramos in May of 1969 galvanized the Puerto Rican community. But in ’72, in November, that was the shooting, and eventually the death, of an undocumented immigrant named Margarito Rosendo Padilla. INS officers had conducted a raid in the Pilsen neighborhood, which was an increasingly Mexican area at that time, and they shot him as they were pursuing him. And the police—sorry, the community came out in significant numbers, marched down to the federal building to protest this, to protest state-sanctioned violence against immigrants—against the undocumented specifically, against Latinos more generally—and the fact that police and other law enforcement agents were doing this with impunity.

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman, with Juan González.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Well, we’re continuing our discussion on a decades-long history of police brutality in Chicago. This week, the Illinois Supreme Court has let stand a less than 7-year prison sentence for former police officer Jason Van Dyke, who was found guilty last year of second-degree murder for killing African-American teenager Laquan McDonald in 2014. The Illinois Supreme Court denied a request by the state’s attorney general to resentence Van Dyke on Tuesday. Van Dyke, who is white, was found guilty on 16 counts of aggravated battery—one count for each of the 16 bullets he fired at McDonald. Illinois Attorney General Kwame Raoul petitioned the state Supreme Court to vacate Van Dyke’s second-degree murder sentence and instead impose a sentence on each of the 16 counts. If the petition had been granted, Van Dyke could have faced to up 96 years in prison. The news that Van Dyke will not be resentenced has sparked criticism throughout Chicago.

AMY GOODMAN: For more, we continue our discussion with two guests. Flint Taylor, attorney with People’s Law Office, author of The Torture Machine: Racism and Police Violence in Chicago, has represented survivors of police torture in Chicago for nearly half a century. Also with us, Lilia Fernández, professor of history and Latino studies at Rutgers University, author of Brown in the Windy City: Mexicans and Puerto Ricans in Postwar Chicago. She also happens to be married to our co-host, Juan González.

We welcome you both, and thank you for staying with us for Part 2 of this discussion. I want to begin with Flint Taylor on your response to the latest on Laquan McDonald. What exactly happened? What was this attempt at resentencing all about?

FLINT TAYLOR: Well, the judge, after Van Dyke was convicted, as you mentioned, for 16 counts of aggravated battery, as well as second-degree murder, went against the Illinois Supreme Court precedent and decided to sentence on the murder charge, which, surprisingly perhaps, carries a lighter potential sentence than the aggravated battery the bullets carried. And he did this, and it raised quite a bit of alarm and anger in the community, as well as with many progressive people.

So, the attorney general, who was just elected, an African-American man by the name of Kwame Raoul, took this to the Illinois Supreme Court and said that the judge acted outside of his authority, based on prior Supreme Court decisions, and that he should have sentenced under the aggravated battery convictions, and that would have made it possible to give Van Dyke a more stringent sentence, more than the four or four-and-a-half years that he ultimately gave Van Dyke.

It did, however, raise some interesting questions in the left and progressive community, particularly in the abolitionist movement, about whether to advocate for longer sentences, even if it is a police officer who is convicted. And we also—in the wake of all of this, we can’t lose the fact that this was a victory to get him convicted. It was a victory that people in the streets, for years, made happen. And without that, there wouldn’t have been an indictment. There wouldn’t have been a conviction. So, we can’t get lost, in my view and, I think, in the view of many, in the idea of how much time Van Dyke got, even though, of course, it raises the fact that officers are treated totally differently than your average African American or brown or poor white would if they were convicted of the same crime.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And I wanted to ask, first Lilia and then Flint also, if you could comment this, because, given all of these cases that have occurred in Chicago of not only abuse, but of tortured confessions and wrongful convictions, Chicago also became the birthplace—the Chicago area—of a movement to overturn these convictions. Of course, Northwestern University, famous for the student projects that were developed about the wrongly convicted, and eventually a Republican governor seeking to stop the death penalty. Could you talk about the impact of these cases on public opinion?

LILIA FERNÁNDEZ: Sure. So, as I was saying earlier, that, you know, the communities in the city were familiar, for many, many years, with repeated cases of police brutality and violence, sometimes against people who were legitimately criminal suspects, and sometimes against people who were completely innocent or who were framed for crimes that they did not commit. So, you know, the fact that beginning in the mid-’90s, I believe it was, perhaps even earlier, that some of these cases were beginning to be overturned, with the advent of DNA evidence, for example, this was in large part the result of years of protest and activism and community members trying to raise awareness about the injustice that many African Americans and Latinos were experiencing. And really, it was those cases, ones like that of Rolando Cruz and many of the African-American men who Flint Taylor also writes about in the book—it was the fact that they had been convicted—I’m sorry, given the death sentence, that advocates were trying to get those wrongful convictions overturned.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And Flint?

FLINT TAYLOR: As Lilia just referred to the Death Row 10, what happened in the ’90s was, as the torture evidence came out and we and other raised these issues in cases of post-conviction in death row cases where men had been sent to death row based on tortured confessions, that the men behind bars on death row organized. And they organized into the Death Row 10. And that Death Row 10 was a group of 10, and later 12, men who were all on death row on the basis of torture. And so, that movement, that was spearheaded by the Death Row 10 and activists on the outside and lawyers that were bringing these cases in the courts, came together with the movement against the death penalty, that was gathering so much strength, the wrongful conviction movement, that was spearheaded at Northwestern and at DePaul and other places.

And as a result of this coming together, the Republican governor, as you mentioned, Juan—Ryan—at first granted a moratorium on the death penalty, and then, as he was leaving office in 2003, he cleared death row, commuted the sentences of all 163 men and women on death row, and pardoned four of the Death Row 10 on the basis of innocence and torture. And that movement, you could see the coming together of those two strains of the movement was so significant in accomplishing that. And then, eight years later, that movement continued, to lead not only to the indictment of Burge, on the one hand, but, on the other hand, to the abolishment of the death penalty in Illinois.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: I want to turn to one of the Death Row 10, Darrell Cannon. He spent more than 20 years in prison after confessing to a murder he didn’t commit, after being tortured by officers under Jon Burge’s command. Darrell Cannon appeared on Democracy Now! in 2015.

DARRELL CANNON: On November the 2nd, 1983, about 15 all-white detectives invaded my apartment, terrorized me, my common-law wife and my cat. And during that day, through—I was tortured in despicable ways, from them using an electric cattle prod to shock me on my genitals and in my mouth. They tried to hang me by my handcuffs, which was cuffed behind my back. And they tried to play a game of Russian roulette on me with a shotgun, and they ended up chipping my two front teeth and splitting my upper lip.

AMY GOODMAN: And then what happened?

DARRELL CANNON: From there, by the time they finished with me that evening, I was ready to say that my mother committed a crime, if they told me that was the case. The type of things that they did to me, I have never in my life experienced, and I’ll never in my life forget. It was something that you couldn’t even conjure up in a horror movie, because you don’t think that Chicago police officers would stoop this low in trying to obtain a confession. It didn’t matter whether or not I was guilty or innocent. In their minds, any time they pick a black man up, he’s guilty.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: That was Darrell Cannon, one of the Death Row 10. And, Flint, that was actually you in that interview at Democracy Now! sitting right next to him. Any other comments on that case?

FLINT TAYLOR: Yes. Darrell’s case is a major part of the book, because Darrell’s case—not only the torture, the fact that he was sent to Tamms, the supermax prison, for nine years and suffered another form of sensory deprivation and torture, the fact that when we got him out many, many years later, he became a leader in the reparations movement, a spokesperson for reparations for the men who, like himself, did not get proper compensation. So, Darrell, as you can tell from that clip, is a remarkable leader and someone who is very much a part of the story of The Torture Machine.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Lilia, I wanted to ask you about the broader context of what police abuse and terror has meant to the black and Latino communities of Chicago, because one of the things that’s being reported more often these days is that there’s a decline in the black population of Chicago, and that, in reality, there’s a re-engineering of our cities, and more and more of the poor are being forced out of the cities.

LILIA FERNÁNDEZ: Right. And I think this is a reason that, in the case of Latinos, there were a number of cases of police abuse in the surrounding suburbs, because beginning in the 1980s, some immigrant populations and some Latinos who had been living in the city started moving out to the suburbs, or arriving to the suburbs initially when they came to this country. And so they were experiencing misconduct, brutality in those places. But one of the things that I think is important for us to understand is the fact that a lot of this police abuse and brutality stemmed from the racial hostility of white communities that really resented the influx of so many Puerto Ricans, Mexican Americans and African Americans who were moving into formerly all-white neighborhoods in the city. And so, the police carried this out, you know, carried those prejudices out into the street, as well, when they encountered these suspects in a variety of different settings.

AMY GOODMAN: And I only can think of Martin Luther King describing when he went to challenge segregation in Chicago. Even through all he had been through in the South, the place he was most afraid was Chicago.

Lilia Fernández, we want to thank you so much for being with us, professor of history and Latino studies at Rutgers University. Your book, Brown in the Windy City: Mexicans and Puerto Ricans in Postwar Chicago. And Flint Taylor, attorney with People’s Law Office, his new book, The Torture Machine: Racism and Police Violence in Chicago.