[It’s important for people to understand that when people first
founded these police departments, they were not designed to promote
some sort of public safety. They were designed with very specific
political repressions in mind. ] [[link removed]]

OCCUPIED TERRITORY: WHY CHICAGO’S HISTORY MATTERS FOR TODAY’S
DEMANDS TO DEFUND POLICE  
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Jeremy Scahill
July 4, 2020
The Intercept
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_ It’s important for people to understand that when people first
founded these police departments, they were not designed to promote
some sort of public safety. They were designed with very specific
political repressions in mind. _

Chicago police officers and a soldier with the Illinois National
Guard on a South Side street corner during the 1919 riot., Chicago
Daily News negatives collection, Chicago History Museum.

 

PROTESTS, MARCHES, AND demonstrations against police violence and
systemic racism are continuing across the United States, as calls to
defund the police and abolish the prison system are intensifying. The
crucial leadership of the Movement for Black Lives has brought these
issues to an international stage. The resilience of these activists is
a sight to behold, to emulate, and to be grateful for.

As activists and some lawmakers ramp up campaigns to defund police in
cities across the United States, it is important to analyze some broad
historical questions about the mission and culture behind policing.
Why do we have police in this country? Why are they organized, armed,
and deployed in the ways that they are? How did police achieve so much
political power? And how have police forces been used to defend the
interests of the elite, crush organized labor, and reign terror on
Black, brown, and poor communities? On the latest episode of
Intercepted, we decided to examine these questions by taking an
in-depth look at the origins and history of one of the most notorious
and racist police forces in this country — the Chicago Police
Department — with historian Simon Balto, a Black studies
professor at the University of Iowa.

Image: Courtesy UNC Press

Balto’s new book, “Occupied Territory: Policing Black Chicago From
Red Summer to Black Power” is a brilliant work of scholarship that
chronicles the history of the Chicago Police Department from the
mid-1800s to the 1970s. “Occupied Territory” uses primary source
documents and testimonials to give lie to some of the most pernicious
and ill-informed characterizations made about Black people and
communities in the United States, including by powerful political and
media figures. At the same time, the book lays out the origins of the
Chicago police as a moralistic enforcement agency, established by
white politicians and land and business owners with the primary aim of
policing the behavior of European immigrants who were largely Irish
and German. As Chicago’s Black population began to grow rapidly, the
police was swiftly transformed into a militarized terror force. Cops
systematically and violently trapped Black Chicagoans in poverty. They
facilitated the use of Black communities as drug-infested business
centers for white organized crime gangs, including Al Capone’s
operation. And they crushed movements for workers’ rights, tenants
rights, and basic human rights. The book also tells the often
suppressed history of Black political organizing and rebellion in
Chicago and offers lessons on how this history speaks to the demands
and struggles of the present moment.

JS: Simon Balto, thank you very much for being with us here on
Intercepted.

SB: Thanks for having me, Jeremy.

JS: So I want to begin by going pretty far back in U.S. history and,
in a general sense, just talk about how police came to be in the
United States. What are the early origins of the idea of city police
forces in the U.S.?

SB: It’s a complicated question in the sense that it varies
somewhat depending on the location. So, I think that the important
thing to understand though regardless of where we are looking is that
the idea that the police exist primarily to keep a generic
“public” safe is something of an invention. So, if we’re looking
at the origins of the police, they primarily were implemented to do
one or both of two things, and that is to preserve economic hierarchy
or to preserve racial hierarchy. So, let me map out a little bit of
what that looks like. In a number of southern cities, the early police
forces either grow directly out of, or overlap significantly with,
early slave patrols.

So, in other words, some of the original police mission in those
places is to surveil and contain and control Black people who are
trying to commit the crime of freeing themselves. In other places,
though, it looks a little different. So, in a city like Chicago, for
example, the early police department is developed primarily by elite
business owners in the city with the primary purpose of controlling
immigrant behavior that they deem to be unruly and just undesirable.
They were especially concerned with the drinking habits of German and
Irish immigrants. But their other primary purpose was to suppress
labor militancy. So one of the early purposes of the CPD is to make
sure that workers who are trying to strike for an 8-hour workday or to
better their working conditions, the police force is deployed to
suppress them. And it depends on the context in terms of where we’re
looking, but I think it’s important for people to understand that
when people first founded these police departments, they were not
designed to promote some sort of public safety. They were designed
with very specific political repressions in mind. And actually
what’s funny to me is that, back when police departments were first
being implemented, in a lot of places they were seen as anti-American.

The case of New York is actually really instructive here. So, when the
New York police department is first implemented in, I believe it’s
the 1840s when New York first gets its force. Chicago’s not until
1853. But in the 1840s, New Yorkers actively resisted the
implementation of a New York police department and the reason that
they did so was that the generational memory of having the city be
occupied by British forces during the Revolutionary War, the police
department reminded people of those occupying forces. And so people
decried the implementation of a police department as antithetical to
the American vision of independence and liberty. And so it’s
interesting to think about in 2020, how the police really originated
in order to protect hierarchy and were actively resisted by people
when they were first being put into place.

JS: Let’s back up because one of the things that you do in this
really remarkable book is you tell the story of how the demographics
in Chicago were shaped, as the age of industrialization really took
hold in the United States. Just paint a bit of a picture for us of how
Black people ended up coming to Chicago in large numbers, when they
did, and who was there building up the city at the time Black people
started to settle in Chicago.

SB: Yeah, I mean Chicago is very much a classic city of immigrants
that during the second half of the 1800s you have a lot of immigrants,
white settlers moving into the city. Obviously it’s all colonized
territory. It was originally indigenous land. But you have a lot of
white settlers that flood into the city in the late 1800s, largely on
the backs of industrialization. But you have Black people that filter
into the city throughout the period of its early settlement. Actually,
the first non-indigenous settler in the city of Chicago was a Black
man. The Black presence in Chicago is literally as old as the city
itself. But it’s not until the 1910s that there’s really a huge
wave of Black in-migration into the city. It’s part of the larger
Great Migration that really radically reshaped the entire demographics
of the country. But during the 1910s and onward into the 1920s you get
hundreds of thousands of Black people that move into Chicago and
that’s when Chicago begins to have what we would call a
statistically significant Black population.

I want to be careful to not erase the fact that there were tens of
thousands of Black people living in the city before that, but it is to
say that during the 1910s and 20s the Black population increases in a
really, really significant way and then it does so again during the
second period of the Great Migration, which really is inaugurated in
the 1940s and continues on into the end of the 1960s. So it’s kind
of a two-fold explosion of the Black population in Chicago, the first
one being in the 1910s and 20s and the second one coming in the 1940s.

JS: Let’s back up for a moment and then we’ll come back and pick
it up from the 1910s. You mentioned earlier this notion that the
police force in Chicago and elsewhere, that originally it was a force
organized around protecting the elites and their interests, and that
it served as more of a moralistic enforcement organization. Later it
would go on to be a strike breaker and then we have the racialization
of police operations, where Black people start to get arrested in
overwhelmingly disproportionate numbers — targeted, beaten,
tortured. But take us back to before the Black population started to
expand. Tell the origin story of the Chicago police, the role of
German and Irish immigrants.

SB: Yeah, the police in Chicago, as I said, the police department is
officially founded in 1853 and the reasons why it is founded in that
particular moment is that you have a large immigrant population that
nativist, white people in the city just find essentially undesirable.
So this is a period in history in which people of German and Irish
descent and some other European populations who we would today
characterize as “white,” were not really embraced as fellow white
people. And so, controlling their habits and controlling their public
behaviors was really of prime interest to Chicago city boosters in the
mid-century. And so controlling those behaviors becomes the impetus
behind putting into place a police department. And so it’s a police
department that is originally pushed by these civic elites who
essentially force the hand of politicians to put a police force into
place, but they actually are the original funders of the police
department too. So it’s literally a police department that is
founded and funded by elite business owners with the express intent of
controlling people who are deemed to be racialized others. And so, I
think that when we think about how, now, the police in 2020 function
essentially as a system of racial control, it actually makes perfect
sense that we could sort of trace that lineage of how, 170 years ago,
when the police department was first founded, it’s in order to
control people who were deemed to be racialized others, that there’s
a continuity there to what the police do, right? It’s just who they
do it to is what changes.

JS: Let’s also talk about the Illinois that Black people were
arriving in. You detail how some forms of slavery were legal in
Illinois, despite the fact that it was in the north, that there was
the equivalent of Black Codes, disenfranchisement, and forms of
slavery were permitted. Just talk a bit about the conditions that
Black people in Chicago or Illinois, more broadly, faced during this
time of the turn of the century.

SB: Illinois is part of the United States and the United States is a
nation whose history is premised in anti-Blackness, among other
things. Illinois was a place that had a lot of anti-Black laws written
into place. And those laws that were in place that supposedly
protected peoples’ civil rights regardless of race were usually
unenforced. One of the interesting pieces of Chicago’s history —
and this is not an insight unique to me — I draw from the work of
other people who detailed early civil rights crusades of Black
Chicagoans, especially. A lot of Black political activity around the
turn of the century revolves around trying to force the state and
various municipalities, including Chicago, to actually follow the
letter of civil rights laws that are in place and facing extraordinary
amounts of reluctance on the part of officials to do anything about
it. I say this as a ride and die Midwesterner, but the idea that so
many people have [a view] of the Midwest and the North more broadly as
a place of freedom and liberty, you know that idea needs to be pretty
carefully qualified. It was a place that was fundamentally different
than the South was under chattle slavery. That the South is a society
completely structured around the institution of slavery but —
Illinois is not a place of benevolent whites who were just willing to
embrace Black people.

JS: Talk also about the rise of the south side of Chicago as what is
described historically as a kind of Black Mecca with Black businesses
thriving, cultural institutions, people taking over housing that had
been occupied by immigrants, often taking the lowest quality houses
and trying to build from that something that was viable and vibrant.

SB: The history of Chicago’s south side is one of both oppression
and achievement, simultaneously. When Black people move into Chicago
during the first Great Migration, options in a lot of things are
limited, right? Options in housing are limited, as you point out.
Options in occupations are limited. And so, it’s a city that is
structurally designed to disadvantage Black people at that moment in
time. And so, what that means is that Black folks generally speaking
are, both because of, in some cases, their own interest of living near
relatives, or friends, or other people that they know, or where their
church is, and social activities are, centralized — people move to
the south side partly because of those reasons — but they also move
to the south side because people in other parts of the city don’t
want them.

And so that takes the form, in some cases, of physical violence. So,
for example, in the late 1910s and into the early 1920s, dozens of
Black homes and businesses are bombed as people try to move into areas
that are deemed for white people only. And then that also takes the
form of more systematized, legal violence. And so that takes the form
of, for example, restrictive covenants that are written into housing
mortgages that prevent the sale or renting of huge swaths of the city
to people who are not “of the caucasian race.” And so, within that
context of limited options, Black Chicagoans build. As you said,
it’s a place of extraordinary Black political achievement, Black
cultural achievement. And so it’s a story again that’s the duality
of Black history in a nutshell of racial repression and then
incredible achievement.

JS: Donald Trump and his supporters and right-wing Republicans
mention Chicago, “Oh, look! They’re killing each other and look at
the crime.” And one of the narratives or stories that you tell in
this book that I found so striking and important for people to
understand is the way in which, beginning in the early 1900s, the
Chicago authorities, the police, the government, local officials —
at the time it was in the hands of the Republicans, but then the
Democrats would take over and they govern in perpetuity to this day
— but in the early 1900s Chicago basically abandoned the “Black
Belt” of the south side of Chicago and pushed the operations for
prostitution, other forms of vice, alcohol, then it extends into Al
Capone and prohibition, but they basically create this Levee, this is
the are of the city where all of this seedy stuff is going to be
allowed to take place, where people will need to go to this community
to take part in it and the police are basically going to stay away
from it and let the cards fall where they fall. It seems like in the
early 1990s, based on your scholarship, what you’re drawing a
connection between is the outbreak of crime in these overwhelmingly
Black areas being linked to a systematic abandonment of those
communities combined with the encouragement for organized crime in the
form of prostitution, alcohol, later drugs. That would be the
headquarters of it, would be where the Black people are living.

SB: Right. The logic that policy makers and police officials operate
under in that moment is that, “look we’re not going to be able to
prevent sex work. We’re not going to ever be able to abolish
drinking, and so on, and so forth. So, what are we going to do about
it?” And what they decide to do about it is that they’ll push it
into places where people, because of the color of their skin, lack
much political weight to do otherwise.

So, the police are pretty explicit about essentially pushing the sex
trade into Black neighborhoods. During Prohibition as well, you have
white mobsters who set up operations in Black communities because they
know that the police just really won’t care. And so when we talk
about the cultivation of vice and other forms of matters deemed
criminal, whether they should be or not, it’s very much put into
place along racialized lines, operating under the racist logic that we
can’t get rid of these things but we can put them in places that we
don’t really care about and that other people, kind of the dominant
population won’t really care about. So we see that in places in the
late 1800s and onward into the 1900s.

JS: Let’s talk for a moment, before we move forward in this
history, of the role of the Chicago police in breaking up strikes,
attacking organized labor, ultimately then Red Squads that were aimed
at taking down the perceived radicals. But I think it’s important to
begin with the Haymarket Square uprising. Just briefly explain when it
happened and what it was about and what happened there.

SB: Yeah, Haymarket is really a seminal moment in Chicago’s
history. So, it’s 1886. There’s been increasing labor militancy
and demands for an 8-hour workday and better working conditions, not
just in Chicago but, in the larger Chicago metro area, and also just
across the country. And so, with Haymarket you have a moment in time
in which people are gathered in a labor protest and the Chicago police
arrive there and it’s coming in the wake of increased hostility
between workers and police officers in Chicago. And what exactly
happened that precipitated the events at Haymarket remains a little
bit of a mystery, but what we do know is that police ended up opening
fire on this crowd of workers and ended up killing a number of people,
including a number of police officers through friendly fire. And so in
the aftermath of this, it’s essentially a bunch of show trials that
are implemented to root out the people who were organizing the events
at Haymarket. And it’s essentially a moment in time that’s really
important, I think, for crystallizing wider public support for the
police in Chicago, especially among corporate interests.

JS: Well, as you write, the Chicago Tribune organized fundraisers for
the police and the first pension program for police was organized.

SB: Right. And so when we think about the history of public support
for the police, it’s through events like this where you have, again,
people who are perceived to be radical agitators or outsiders who the
police are called upon to repress. But again it’s people who are
organizing to try to better the conditions for people who are
underpaid, overworked, who work in hazardous conditions. What our
perceptions of what public goods are is, I think, an important metric
for thinking about what police do. We see, as you point out, the Trib
and other people really pushing for support of the police in the
aftermath of Haymarket when, if we actually recalibrate what we think
is important, we can better understand that the police are not on the
right side of that history. And I think that with the benefit of
hindsight we see that, or at least I see that. But at that moment in
time people failed to really connect the dots between who is on the
right side of this.

JS: Yeah and in the book you mark that incident at Haymarket as a
turning point that results in increased funding and equipment and
militarization of the police.

SB: Right and that’s sort of a constant where you have these
moments of really extraordinary police violence that could be moments
of reckoning with the police power but instead result in the doubling
down of peoples’ investments in the police.

JS: I want to also move to the “race riots” of 1919, but just to
give people a statistic that you unearthed and cite in this book: From
1917 to 1921, 58 Black homes or residences were bombed because the
residents or owners of those properties were Black people who had
moved to overwhelmingly white neighborhoods. And the police did almost
nothing in response to this spate over four years of bombings of Black
homes where people had dared to move a bit outside of the “Black
Belt.”

SB: The history of Chicago’s police department when it comes to
racial violence is essentially one of protecting white interests and
doing very little to protect Black life or property. It inspires some
interesting historical moments. Black folks organized around these
bombings to essentially begin trying to do the work that the police
should technically be doing. You have local organizers that
essentially try to launch investigations into who’s behind these
bombings. In other words, doing what we think the police should be
doing. You also have other Black people who talk about arming
themselves to protect their own homes and businesses. So, embracing
armed self-defense because the police won’t do the job. And we see
this play out in various forms over and over again. The same thing
happens in the 1940s and 50s when Black people are again moving into
the city and moving into previously white neighborhoods where white
people are engaged in straight up terrorism against these people when
they’re moving into white neighborhoods. That includes arson, it
includes turning over cars, includes beating. It’s all sorts of
different terrorist methods to prevent integration of city
neighborhoods. And again, and again, and again, the police fail to do
the job of protecting Black life and property.

I mean in some cases, for years, you have mobs of white terrorists who
try to drive Black people out of their homes. This was most famously
the case at the Trumbull Park housing project and when civil rights
leaders in Chicago in 1955, for example, are holding memorial rallies
for Emmett Till after he’s lynched in Mississippi. They tied
directly the lynching of Emmett Till in Mississippi to the ongoing
terrorism that white mobs are visiting upon Black people in Chicago
and the failure of the police department in Chicago to actually
protect them from those terrorist mobs.

So, there’s an interesting linkage that Black organizers are making
between terrorism in Mississippi and terrorism in Chicago and the fact
that Mayor Richard Daley, who’s newly elected in that moment, issues
a condemnation of the lynching of Emmett Till but refuses to actually
respond to Black demands in Chicago for the police department to
actually keep Black people safe. And so it’s an ongoing thread that
when white people use political violence to try to prevent Black
migration and integration of white neighborhoods, that the police
department just continuously refuses to actually do the job of
protecting Black people.

I would just add, as one final note, that one of the responses that
police officials make that is particularly galling is that when Black
organizers are demanding that the police actually protect Black life
and Black property in these types of moments, the police officials’
response is to suggest that Black people should put a pause on
integration because having to dispatch police officers to these sites
of white violence is sapping the city’s resources to have police
coverage in other parts of the city. So, in other words, police
officials essentially have an intellectual ranking of their priorities
and wherever protecting Black life and property falls upon that
ranking, it’s somewhere very low and much further down on what they
see as other priorities.

JS: At the time of the 1919 “race riot,” as you document in your
book, the Black population of Chicago was not yet big enough to be at
the center of policing policy or at the center of public policy in
Chicago. But the summer of 1919 really started to shift that in terms
of the police focus. I think it’s important to just back up and
remind people of what we’re talking about when we’re talking about
the riot of 1919. As you document in the book, this started when a
group of young Black men —  kids — were in a part of Lake
Michigan that was unofficially the Black section and then you had the
white section not far from it. And they had gone out on a raft in
“their area” of Lake Michigan and the tide starts to sweep them
southward toward the “white area” of the beach and a white man on
the shore starts pelting their boat with rocks and stones. They lose
control of the raft. One of the young men goes under and dies. No one
responds to go and get him. His friends come ashore and they approach
a Black Chicago police officer and try to identify this man as being
the culprit who was pummeling them with these rocks and stones and
then a white officer intervenes and then that man is let go and
nothing happens to him.

But that sparks — and it’s important to talk about that moment
where the Black police officer is approached by these young Black men
and he is overridden by the white officer — it was that response to
this incident that took place that ultimately sparked what would
become known as the “race riots” of 1919. So, Simon pick it up
from there.

SB: You laid out pretty well what the precipitating event was. I
think it’s important for people to call back to the period of
1917-1921 where there are 58 bombings. Chicago was, in some ways,
already a bit of a tinderbox when this all happened. But people were
pretty clear in the aftermath of these riots that ultimately killed 38
people, that the reason why it all started was really this white
police officer named Daniel Callahan, it was his refusal to allow an
arrest of a white murderer that really set everything off and really
had set the course of events for what happened.

So over the coming days, the city essentially descends into what
people call a race riot but was essentially white marauders going
through mostly the Black south side, parts of the Black south side.
There were other incidents in a few other places in the city, but
essentially you have white youth gangs especially, more generally
white mobs, terrorizing and killing Black people; and then Black
people taking up arms to respond to this terrorism. So it’s not just
a story of white terrorism and Black victimization, it’s also a
story of Black self-defense in the face of that terrorism. But it’s
important to not lose sight of the fact that people were very clear
about the fact that Callahan was largely responsible for setting this
chain of events in motion. You could also make the case that George
Stauber, which was the name of the man who murdered Eugene Williams,
was also responsible, but people said that if Callahan had allowed
Stauber to be arrested, that [it’s] likely what happened afterwards
would not have happened, at least not in the way it did.

JS: As you write in your book, the chief of police in Chicago cited
that moment as _the_ inciting moment and said, openly, that allowing
that arrest to happen would likely have prevented it. He actually
suspended the officer, but then in the end the officer goes on and has
his career as a Chicago police officer. But even the chief of police
noted what you’re saying, which is people were demanding an arrest.
A white officer overrode a Black officer. This man was not arrested
and everything followed was a result of that inciting moment.

SB: Right. And, as you mentioned, Callahan is suspended for a while.
He’s later reinstated. And he’s a man who’s very proudly racist.
When he’s interviewed by the official city commission that was put
in place to study what had happened during the so-called riots, [he]
explicitly says that if something like that were to happen again, he
felt fairly confident that his fellow white Chicagoans would stand
beside him, in waging this race war. It’s really striking to think
about the fact that he was so willing and open in just saying it, as a
matter of public record. And we can look at him as a particularly
awful example of this, but he’s also, in a lot of ways,
representative of the larger ideologies that shaped what policing
looked like in Chicago at the time.

JS: So walk us through that decade that follows that killing in 1919
and then the riots, the rebellion, the self-determination that Black
people were asserting in response to this. Because it’s a crucial
decade where you have the rise of organized labor; you have the
Communist party starting to become very strong in Chicago; you have a
lot of worker-centered uprisings. You then have the Great Depression
hit and it’s sort of the era when the Democrats start campaigning
for power in Chicago and one of the central themes of their platform
was “law and order,” as we now see Trump tweeting this all the
time. But you also trace the genesis of that term in the Chicago
political machine. So lay out what happens throughout the 20s and into
the early 30s regarding Chicago police and the growing Black
population of the city.

SB: In the aftermath of the riots in 1919, there’s some patterns
that emerged in the study of the riots that I think are really
important to understand in terms of what policing looked like. What
comes out in the aftermath of the riots is that it was very clear that
police were operating generally under the assumption that Black people
were the criminals and white people were the victims in the riot,
despite the fact that that was a total inversion of the reality. What
I mean by that is, you look at the arrest records of who the police
were arresting during the riots — it was very clear that the focus
was trained pretty steadily upon arresting Black people. This leads to
some striking things. The grand jury who’s convened to hear cases of
people who had been arrested during the riots actually, effectively
goes on strike until more white rioters are brought up before them
because even they sense that this is a really, really striking racial
disproportion in terms of how Black people are being treated during
and after the riots by the police department. And that really shapes a
lot of what is happening with the police down to the present day in
the sense that Black people are left essentially to their own devices
when it comes to having to protect themselves during that moment. So
they are not offered adequate protection by the police and, also,
they’re incredibly overpoliced, right? So, you have people that are
simultaneously feeling all of the repressions of the police with none
of the supposed benefits of it. And that’s really, in a lot of ways,
the guiding thesis that animates a lot of what I trace in the book
that follows.

In terms of the specific decade or decade plus that follows, it’s a
really important decade politically for Chicago. And what I mean by
that is: This is a period of time in which the Republican machine and
the Democratic machine are really vying for control of the city and
it’s during this moment, by the end of the 1920s, that the
Democratic political machine that has a stranglehold on Chicago really
emerges from the fray as being the political machine that’s going to
control the city’s future. When that political machine coheres and
asserts its dominance, it’s really disinterested and actually
actively hostile to Black people because Black voters had
traditionally been voting Republican. And so, at that founding moment
of this powerful machine, it’s organized really explicitly around,
if not anti-Blackness — although I think you could say
anti-Blackness — but it’s organized really with no interest in
responding at all to Black grievances or Black needs or anything like
that. And that manifests in the police department because the
political machine really has extraordinary amounts of control over the
police.

The relationship between the two is incredibly incestuous in that
Democratic politicians essentially appoint their friends and neighbors
and family members to positions on the police force. You get people
that have essentially no qualifications for the job other than just
knowing the right people and so the Democratic machine totally
distorts and twists the demographics of the police force and how the
police actually operate to the advantage of white neighborhoods and
the disadvantage of Black ones. And this is a story that continues to
unfold and manifest over time in the coming decades. And part, also,
of what the Democratic machine is doing during that moment, as you
point out, is asserting “law and order” over, again, people who
are, as we saw back in the context of Haymarket, people who are deemed
to be politically radical. And that manifests most strikingly in the
ways that it treats and responds to Black communist organizers on the
south side. Again, this is in the emergent, early years of the Great
Depression. The Communist Party is extraordinarily active on
Chicago’s southside and it’s really, really active in terms of
battling austerity measures that the city is putting in place. And
where this takes shape most clearly is in anti-eviction organizing.
And so, you would get landlords who are booting people out of their
homes when they can’t make rent and when they are doing that, it’s
the sheriff’s department and oftentimes police officers who are
helping them do so — who are arriving at the scene to help
essentially just take all their peoples’ possessions and essentially
just leave them on the curb.

And so what communist organizers do is essentially mobilize fleets of
people to go into these homes and once the evictions have been
completed, they just take all the possessions and put them back, and
essentially move people back into their own homes. And so it’s a
fairly radical denial of the state’s authority to make people
houseless, but it’s also a rejection of the police’s authority to
aid in that process. And so the police engage in really, really
increasingly hostile confrontation, and eventually violent exchanges
with these organizers, and so that leads to, oftentimes, police
killing people who are trying to prevent evictions from happening. But
also this police repression then has the counter effect of actually
driving up a lot of public support for these organizers who are doing
this anti-austerity work. And so you have tens of thousands of people
out in the streets after the police kill three Black communists in one
of these anti-eviction events. So you have tens of thousands of people
out in the streets, paying respects to these men who have been killed.
You have people hanging the mayor in effigy in protest to police
brutality. It’s a moment in which the police power is asserting
itself to control Black radical organizing but it’s also a moment in
time in which there’s some pretty astute and important resistance to
the assertion of that authority.

JS: Yeah and as you point out in the book, and so much of your book
is incredibly relevant to the moment that we’re living through right
now, you point out that during this period, leftist organizers,
communists, and others begin to interweave the struggle, the
anti-racist struggle, with the anti-capitalist struggle and then the
state’s response is often overwhelming force and brutality. You
start to see a spike in police torture of, particularly of Black men
while they’re in custody and you had the formation of the Red Squad.
And among the tactics of the Red Squad that you document in the book
was ramming police vehicles into crowds of people.

SB: As a historian, watching what’s unfolding now, I mean I just
saw this morning or yesterday the video of the Detroit police officer
ramming his car through protesters and it’s striking to me all the
parallels that exist, which is not to say that everything remains
static from the 1930s to now, but the degree to which it rhymes and
the way we can see the past playing out in the present is really
striking.

But yeah, the Red Squad, which is essentially the
“anti-subversive” squad is initially put in place to deal with
political radicals. So it’s a wing of the police department that is
explicitly tasked with controlling politically radical groups and
individuals, but uniformly, who are deemed politically radical, are
essentially left-wing individuals and organizations. I’ve been in
the Red Squad’s files and they’re really striking in a lot of ways
and they’re very incomplete because the police department destroyed
a lot of them before they were actually turned over to the Chicago
history museum. But, what’s striking about them is the degree to
which you will find very, very little evidence that they had any
interest at all in white terrorist organizations or white supremacist
groups. Although it’s founded to combat “political extremism,”
really it doesn’t take very long at all for them to train their
focus very very heavily on Black organizers and Black organizations.
And, I think part of that is because, as you point out, a lot of the
Black organizing that is done is a fundamental critique of the very
organization of the city itself. I mean that it’s not just about
racial predation and battling white supremacy. It’s also about the
various ways in which that predation and white supremacy manifests
itself in material forms in the city, too. Black organizers are
challenging the ways in which, structurally, the city is arranged in
ways that disadvantage Black communities. I think that part of the
explanation for why the Red Squad was so interested in Black
organizers was because the Red Squad themselves understood, and
members of the Red Squad and leaders of the Red Squad understood that
Black critiques of the ways that Chicago was arranged had very, very
deep implications for the ways that the city would be able to operate.

JS: Of course in the 1920s, you had this resurgence and interest
around the Ku Klux Klan among white supremacists and of course it also
existed in the north, but extending all the way into the 30s and 40s,
the relationship between the Chicago police and white vigilante actors
or groups.

SB: There’s an interesting and deep, if somewhat difficult to find
in the archives, relationship between the police force and hate
groups. I had some brief Twitter exchanges with some other scholars
trying to figure out if people had done much research on this and it
seems to me like most of us have just had a hard time finding much in
the archives. But what I have been able to find is really telling. The
most striking moment for me is, in the late 1960s, there’s a cell of
Ku Klux Klansmen who are Chicago police department officers and who
are recruiting within the police department to try to expand their
ranks. And what I found really striking about it, besides the fact of
their existence, was the fact that they were apparently doing this
recruiting for about a year before they were outed and ultimately
fired. And the reason that they were ultimately outed and fired was
because a Black police officer got wind of what was going on and
finally reported this activity. But what that means is that, for a
year, Klansmen were organizing within the police department among
white officers and no one reported it. And I think that that in and of
itself is really telling in terms of how just accepted as the norm
this sort of thing was, even if it was an unspoken reality. And the
things that these Klansmen were talking about doing was crazy.
Essentially what they were plotting to do was to assassinate a number
of high ranking officials in the city and essentially get “Black
militants” blamed for it. And their explicit goal was to incite a
race war. And so, again, when we think about how we know now that
white supremacists have been exploiting this current moment to
essentially — in some ways attacking cops — essentially to get
Black Lives Matter protesters blamed for it as inciting this violence.
And so it’s again one of those interesting parallels from how the
past rhymes with the present.

JS: There’s an extraordinary document that you cite in the book
from 1951 from the Civil Rights Congress. They delivered a petition to
the United Nations Genocide Convention — this is 1951 — under the
title “We charge genocide: The historic petition to the United
Nations for relief from a crime of the United States government
against the Negro people.” The document, you write, “gathered
evidence of the murders of American Blacks and the abuse, harassment,
and terror unleashed on them in the years since World War II: “Once
the classic lynching was the rope,” activists wrote, “now it is
the policeman’s bullet. To many an American, the police are the
government, certainly its most visible representative. We submit that
the evidence suggests that the killing of Negroes has become police
policy in the United States and that police policy is the most
practical expression of government policy.”” Give the context for
this document. Who wrote it and what was happening at that moment?

SB: Yeah. I mean, so, it’s a really powerful document, I mean, and
it’s just a little bit — I mean it’s overwhelming in its
evidence.

JS: Just to clarify, this document — this is Black organizers
charging the United States at the United Nations with, effectively
with genocide because of the conduct of the police in cities like
Chicago.

SB: It’s partly about the police. It’s not only about the police.
So the context behind it is that the years immediately after World War
II is a period of incredible racist violence in the United States. You
have a lot of returning Black servicemen who come back and the image
of Black men in army uniforms so enrages many white supremacists that
Black servicemen are straight up lynched in uniform for the crime of
wearing their uniform. Because it was a refutation of the logic of
white supremacy. And so, you have that factoring into the “We charge
genocide” document, but they were also very, very concerned about
the ways in which police both abetted that racist violence by not
doing anything about it but also contributed directly to it. So, the
“We charge genocide” authors documented the ways in which police
officers from Birmingham to Chicago were actively contributing tothe
murder of Black people. And so it’s a really, really striking
document that had the resonance that it continues to have is pretty
remarkable. And actually there’s a coalition of young Black
activists in recent years in Chicago that actually organized
themselves under the masthead of “We charge genocide” and went and
testified to the United Nations again about police violence in Chicago
and elsewhere. And so it’s one of those documents that is sort of
depressingly relevant to our current time. When we look at these
overwhelming lists and accountings of Black people killed through
state violence, just in recent years, the “We charge genocide”
document is the 1951 equivalent to those accountings and it’s really
a pretty incredible document.

JS: I want to make sure we get to more contemporary history, but I
really do think that there’s a utilitarian value for all of us to
hearing the stories that you’ve documented in this book to
understand how we got to where we are today. And just one other
historical episode I wanted to ask you about. You mentioned earlier
the murder of Emmett Till. He was of course lynched in August of 1955
and his mother basically had to smuggle his body back to Chicago and
put it on public display so that the world could see what happened to
her child. It was during that period when activists began to refer to
Chicago as “Little Mississippi.” But I want to talk about the
significance of what Emmett Till’s mother did with that action by
taking her son’s dead body, after he was lynched, and then putting
it on display in Chicago for the world to see what happened to him.

SB: Yeah, it’s a really important moment in our nation’s history.
What it meant is a pretty sprawling question, but I would say what it
meant most directly was that it had the effect of activating new
people into activism that had not previously been politically active.
A lot of people who were young members of the civil rights movement in
the late 1950s and the 1960s referred to themselves as the “Till
generation” because they talked about how when they saw the image of
Emmett Till’s brutally mutilated body they saw someone who could
have been them, is essentially how they talked about it. And so it had
this really important catalyzing effect on people to become more
politically engaged and then those were the people who would go on to
really change the world in a lot of ways through the activism that
they waged in the late 50s and onward into the 60s. So I think that
the most important effect that it had was kind of that catalyzing
impact that it had on a lot of people to become active.

JS: I want to get to just briefly the sections of your book where you
talk about the Black Panther Party and Fred Hampton. But before we do
that, by the mid 60s, you write that “the Chicago police department
was supported politically by members of both major parties, was flush
with cash and possessed extraordinary power and autonomy.” How did
the Chicago police department ultimately gain and grow its political
power, which endures to this day, starting in the mid-60s.

SB: Well, it’s a bit of a complicated question but the answer, in a
lot of ways, comes back, I think, to a general acknowledgement by
white people in positions of power essentially seeing that the police
were going to be an effective form of racial control and deeming that
a worthwhile project. So, what I mean by that is that there’s all of
this momentum in the 1960s to really lobby for increasing police
power. So the police department in most of the 1960s is overseen by a
guy named Orlando WIlson and Wilson is one of the most esteemed
criminal justice minds when he’s hired as the superintendent of the
CPD. He’s actually brought in in the wake of this enormous
corruption scandal in late 1959 that makes headlines in the 1960s
where Richard Daley is forced to fire his police superintendent and
bring in someone who can fix the department. But what Wilson does is
he modernizes and professionalizes the department, but he also makes
pretty explicit the ways in which the police are going to be
instruments of racial control. And it’s interesting because he’s
held up as a racial liberal, and by all accounts in terms of his
public comments and things like that, he appears to have been somewhat
liberal, I guess. But, there’s a really striking document that I
found in his papers, which are housed at Berkeley where he makes a
very explicit argument for an increased budgetary allotment for the
police department so that they can hire more people based solely and
explicitly on the fact that Chicago is getting Blacker. So
essentially, they use predictive modeling of population growth to say,
“Look, Chicago is going to get X percentage more young Black people
coming into the city for the remainder of the 1960s and so we need an
equivalent budgetary increase to hire more police officers.” And
it’s an argument that works spectacularly. By that moment in time,
someone like Orlando Wilson can tell public officials to jump and
they’ll just say “how high?” I think that is in a lot of ways
because there is a broad recognition that by that point in time, in
the 1960s, the police department generally speaking is an institution
whose attentions are focused overwhelmingly on controlling Black
people and Black spaces. And by that time, white people just sort of
assume that that is the legitimate reason for the police to exist. The
police, by that point in time, are really, in a lot of ways, just
deciding to no longer operate much in white communities. By this
moment in time, white arrest rates are declining quite rapidly. And
that remains true until this day. I mean it’s statistically
extraordinarily difficult to get arrested while white in Chicago now.
And it’s during that moment in time where police repressions and
police attentions are focusing increasingly and overwhelmingly on
Black parts of the city. And so I don’t think it’s a coincidence
that that is when the budgetary allotments begin to explode because
that’s seen as a legitimate police function.

JS: And in the midst of this scene that you’re describing, you have
the emergence of the Black Panther Party in Chicago. Talk about their
efforts to curb violence in their community, but also to confront the
Chicago Police Department and it ultimately culminates with the
assassination of Black Panther Party leaders Fred Hampton and Mark
Clark in December of 69. But talk about the rise of the Black Panthers
and the response of the Chicago police and power structure during the
60s.

SB: The Panthers are famously founded in the Bay Area in ’66, and
they’re late in coming to Chicago actually. It’s not until 1968
that there’s a formally chartered chapter there of the Panthers. But
during the year or so when they were really, really politically active
in Chicago, really just saw some extraordinary achievements on their
part. I mean the Panthers are really misunderstood in American
history. And Chicago is sort of a classic example of what they did.
When we’re talking about curbing violence in the community, what the
Panthers were really concerned about was
curbing _structural_ violence. So, through the implementation of
things like a free breakfast for children program in Chicago, free
community health clinic for people whose health needs were not being
met, free programs to bus family members to visit incarcerated loved
ones down state. I mean these are all programs that the Panthers in
Chicago put into effect with pretty remarkable success. And they were
also really concerned with building cross-racial alliances and
solidarities with other organizations. So this included working with
white organizations, with Puerto Rican organizations, to really try to
identify common points of structural oppression and violence and try
to figure out ways to mitigate them. This included things like police
violence and police brutality, of course.

When the Panthers are organizing alongside comrades from other
organizations, in 1969 particularly, the level of state repression
that is visited upon these efforts is overwhelming. The assassination
of Fred Hampton and Mark Clark is really the culmination of a year
long violent campaign that the Chicago Police Department, with the
assistance of the FBI, waged against the Panthers. The Panthers’
headquarters are frequently raided; supplies that they’ve acquired
to feed kids in the free breakfast for children program are burned by
the police. And it’s just a period of increasing hostility and
aggression and violence that the murders of Fred Hampton and Mark
Clark are sort of the culminating point of. And the murder of Fred
Hampton, especially, who was widely identified as one of the most
promising political organizers not just in Chicago but in the country.
And he’s only 21 years old when he’s assassinated. But it’s a
tragedy for a lot of different reasons. It’s not primarily a tragedy
politically, but the political components of the tragedy really are
couched in the fact that the things that he was able to do were really
seeing some significant successes in the city. And the Panthers, in a
lot of ways, are gutted by the assassination of Fred Hampton. I want
to be clear, though, that the story of the Black Panthers in Chicago
doesn’t completely end with the assassination of Fred Hampton. And
again, the reason I want to be careful about that is I think that
there’s important stories and lessons about the aftermath of his
assassination that have relevance for right now. So in the wake of his
assassination, there are dozens of organizations that are founded
across the city, inspired by his memory, to really try to confront
police brutality as it exists, primarily in Black and brown
communities. And the Panthers continue to be parts of those efforts
and I think the most important initiative that came out of that was,
in the early 70s, what’s left of the Black Panther Party in Chicago
organizes a citywide coalition to fight for community control of the
police.

And what community control of the police looked like has a whole
variety of different components, but part of it was exactly what it
sounds like in terms of not necessarily abolishing the police, but
radically reimagining the police, decentralizing the police and
essentially neighborhoods having control over what policing looked
liked within their particular neighborhoods. But I think that the
really important component to what community control looked like in
the eyes of that coalition is what we would today identify as
defunding the police. So again, they’re not calling for outright
abolition of police, but they are saying, at that point in time, the
Chicago Police Department’s budget  had grown to over $300 million
a year — it’s now $1.7 billion a year — so when they looked at
that $300 million budget line for the Chicago police, part of what
they were calling for with community control was to take a significant
portion of that investment in the police and putting it into other
things. Putting it into schools, putting it into job training, putting
it into community health, and so on and so forth. So when people today
talk about defunding the police as being this entirely new concept
without historical precedent, it’s not true. I mean the specific
nomenclature may be new, but it’s actually an idea that is at least
half a century old.

JS: Finally, Simon, from all the scholarship that you’ve done,
deeply looking at the history of the Chicago police, primarily up to
1970, what are the big takeaways from your research that you can share
with people to understand the way that current police forces operate
and their relationship with Black people, Black property, Black
communities?

SB: So, I think that there are a number of important takeaways. I
think that the first one that people should be thinking about is that
the fundamental premise that the police exist and the police were
brought into existence to “protect us” or keep us safe, that’s a
myth. The police in Chicago and elsewhere were first put into place in
order to protect capital and to protect racial hierarchies. And so,
when we think about the ways in which police forces currently operate,
if we know that as the founding story of police, I think that the way
that they operate makes a whole lot more sense. Because they’re
essentially continuing to do now what they were founded to do, which
is to protect capital and to protect racial hierarchy. And so I think
that’s the first big takeaway. The second big takeaway is that when
we think about the problems of policing and why policing doesn’t
work, at least doesn’t work the way people like to think it does,
when we look at how Black communities like Chicago’s experience
policing, it’s a two-sided story. So on the one hand, it’s a story
of being overpoliced, of being subject to constant harassment,
constant surveillance, constant violence, including torture. All of
that happens while, at the same time, Black communities do not
actually experience much in the way of supposed public safety. So when
we think about communities that are the most subject to intercommunal
violence, the communities that are the least safe, they’re also the
communities that are also the most overpoliced. And so it raises the
question of: What’s the point? And people like Trump and others
enjoy looking at Chicago’s gun violence and saying, “Well, look at
that gun violence. This is why we need police.” But actually, when
we look at Chicago’s gun violence and the long history of it, the
fact [is] that the Chicago Police Department almost never is able to
arrest people who commit homicides. The clearance rate for homicides
in Chicago is below 20 percent. Really what the story is is that
policing doesn’t work. That if this gun violence is so relentless
and so untethered to actual police presences, it’s actually a total
refutation of the idea that policing works. So that’s the second big
takeaway that I would say — and, if I’m just going to do a list of
three, I would just say that people who are out in the streets or who
are sympathetic to calls to defund and abolish, I think it’s
important to understand that we are part of a long lineage of people
who have struggled with and rejected the legitimacy of police power as
it exists and as it is visited upon communities of color in the United
States. That people who are out in the streets right now calling for
defunding and abolition, or people who are contributing financially to
those causes and things like that, it’s part of a tradition of
protest against police violence that has been going on for longer than
any of us have been alive.

JS: Well, I have to say, this is, this is an extraordinary piece of
work that you have assembled here and I really hope that people pick
up this book. And while it is published by an academic press, it is
remarkably accessible and that’s to your credit. Simon Balto, thank
you so much for being with us here on Intercepted.

_JEREMY SCAHILL is one of the three founding editors of The Intercept.
He is an investigative reporter, war correspondent, and author of the
international best-selling books, “Dirty Wars: The World Is a
Battlefield” and “Blackwater: The Rise of the World’s Most
Powerful Mercenary Army.” He has reported from Afghanistan, Iraq,
Somalia, Yemen, Nigeria, the former Yugoslavia, and elsewhere across
the globe. Scahill has served as the national security correspondent
for The Nation and Democracy Now!._

_Scahill’s work has sparked several congressional investigations and
won some of journalism’s highest honors. He was twice awarded the
prestigious George Polk Award, in 1998 for foreign reporting and in
2008 for “Blackwater.” Scahill is a producer and writer of the
award-winning film “Dirty Wars,” which premiered at the 2013
Sundance Film Festival and was nominated for an Academy Award._

_Become a Member of THE INTERCEPT_

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