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Students are expected to produce a PowerPoint presentation covering one of the chapters in the Stamper book. A signup sheet was sent around the class and has been posted in a recent announcement. Your work should be uploaded to Canvas prior to your scheduled presentation date. Your presentation should be 5-8 slides and the presentation should last 10-15 minutes. Please don’t skimp on this assignment. Make sure your slides are pleasing to look at and also accurate, detailed, and informative regarding chapter contents. Points will be awarded based on these considerations.Chapter 10: Flex Your RightsI have attached the details for the powerpoint and chapter 10 below. I need enough information on the slides so the presentation will last 10-15 minutes. It needs to be high quality slides and information. Speaker notes detailing the slides as well
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Stamper, Norm. To Protect and Serve: How to Fix America’s Police. 2016.
Students are expected to produce a PowerPoint presentation covering one of the chapters in the
Stamper book. A signup sheet was sent around the class and has been posted in a recent
announcement. Your work should be uploaded to Canvas prior to your scheduled presentation
date. Your presentation should be 5-8 slides and the presentation should last 10-15 minutes.
Please don’t skimp on this assignment. Make sure your slides are pleasing to look at and also
accurate, detailed, and informative regarding chapter contents. Points will be awarded based on
these considerations.
Chapter 10: Flex Your Rights
Chapter 10: Flex Your Rights
IN 1973, ANTHONY HOLMES was led into an interrogation room on Chicago’s South Side.
Accused of murder, handcuffed and manacled, he awaited his interrogator, Detective Jon
Burge. Burge showed up carrying a small black box, featuring a crank and two wires. He
attached one wire to Holmes’s wrists, the other to his ankles. The detective then stretched a
plastic bag over Holmes’s head. When Holmes bit through it in order to breathe, Burge applied
another, and twisted it tight. Then he cranked and cranked, and the screams rang out.
As Holmes told prosecutors during a 2006 investigation into Burge’s conduct, “When he hit me
with the voltage, that’s when I started gritting, crying, hollering. . . . It [felt] like a thousand
needles going through my body. . . . And then after that, it just [felt] like, you know—it [felt] like
something just burning me from the inside, and, um, I shook, I gritted, I hollered, then I passed
out.”1 All the while, according to Holmes, Burge kept demanding, “You going to talk, nigger?
You going to talk?” Later, in 1982, with a couple of cop killers on the loose, Burge personally led
the manhunt. As a detective would later describe it, “I don’t know what Kristallnacht was like, but
this was probably close. [The gang crimes unit’s] idea is you go out and pick up 2,000 pounds of
nigger and eventually you’ll get the right one.” Following five successive days and nights on that
job, Burge picked the lock at the home of one of the alleged suspects and arrested, violently,
one Andrew Wilson. Burge then personally led the fifteen-hour interrogation that followed.
Wilson confessed but, according to the Chicago Reader, would later recant, telling “public
defender Dale Coventry that he’d been shocked, burned by a radiator, suffocated with a plastic
bag, and kicked in the eye and beaten. . . . Coventry had photos of a huge burn on his client’s
thigh, parallel burns on his chest, and strange U-shaped puncture marks on his nose and ears.
Wilson said the marks came from alligator clips attached to wires leading to a hand-cranked
electrical device. He said Burge shocked him on his genitals and his back with a second device
that resembled a curling iron.”3 And so it went. For two decades, an American police officer and
his sizable posse of like-minded rogue detectives committed gross violations of civil liberties and
human rights. Burge personally tortured or otherwise abused as many as two hundred of
Chicago’s citizens, mostly African American men. And the price he paid for this behavior?
Numerous commendations from the brass, and successive promotions, ultimately topping out
as detective commander of Chicago’s Area 2. Richard M. Daley, Cook County state’s attorney
at the time, not only turned a blind eye to Burge’s outrages, he commended the detective. Even
after having been warned, in 1982, by then police superintendent Richard Brzeczek that a
doctor had presented evidence of the torture of Andrew Wilson, Daley, an officer of the court,
refused to investigate. Then Daley got elected mayor of Chicago. After which he steadfastly
discredited a thorough inquiry by a pair of Chicago Police Department Office of Professional
Standards investigators who produced a two-section report on (1) a history of Area 2
misconduct allegations and (2) an analysis of the Andrew Wilson case. The mayor’s denials,
throughout a forty-eight-page deposition from 2006, suggest that both as state attorney and as
mayor, Daley refused to believe that Commander Burge could have done what he stood
accused of doing. Later in 2006, when a special prosecutor issued a report confirming the
pattern and practice of Burge’s torture, Daley announced that he would apologize to all of the
commander’s victims. Finally, a breakthrough. Or was it? Here’s Daley’s apology, as he
expressed it to the Chicago Independent Media Center: “The best way is to say, ‘Okay. I
apologize to everybody [for] whatever happened to anybody in the city of Chicago’. . . . So, I
apologize to everybody. Whatever happened to them in the city of Chicago in the past, I
apologize. I didn’t do it, but somebody else did it. Your editorial was bad. I apologize. Your
article about the mayor, I apologize. I need an apology from you because you wrote a bad
editorial,” Daley said, laughing. “You do that and everybody feels good. Fine. But I was not the
mayor. I was not the police chief. I did not promote [Burge]. You know that. But you’ve never
written that and you’re afraid to. I understand.”4 That a mayor—first as state’s attorney, then as
the top elected official of the nation’s third largest city—would petulantly, cavalierly brush off
responsibility for such breathtaking police abuse is beyond the pale. Daley’s flippant, sarcastic
“apology” stands in marked contrast to the way today’s city officials, including current mayor
Rahm Emanuel, have responded to the travesty—at least on the surface. On May 6, 2015,
Emanuel and the city council agreed to $5.5 million in “reparations” for Burge’s victims, dating
from the early 1970s to the early 1990s. All told, the whole matter has cost the taxpayers of
Chicago roughly $100 million in lawsuits against, and in defense of, Mr. Burge.5 Regrettably,
more recent developments raise fundamental questions about Mayor Emanuel’s overall
leadership in dealing with patterns of deep-seated police abuse within his city’s police
department. These disclosures raise doubts about the mayor’s timing and motives in both the
Burge settlement and yet another high-profile police shooting case. ON OCTOBER 20, 2014,
Chicago Police Department (CPD) officers responded to a report of a young man with a knife,
allegedly breaking into vehicles in a trucking yard in the 4100 block of Pulaski Road. Upon their
arrival, seventeen-year-old Laquan McDonald reportedly slashed a tire on a police car and
damaged its window. In a police dash-cam video, we see Officer Jason Van Dyke approach
McDonald as the youth walks away from the police. Within seconds—and with McDonald clearly
veering away from the officers—Van Dyke fires a single round. The teenager drops instantly to
the asphalt, whereupon the officer continues to fire, emptying his weapon. Puffs of smoke on
the cool evening air can be seen rising from the boy’s inert body as Van Dyke fires each of the
additional fifteen rounds from his semiautomatic pistol. The first officer on the scene had
determined that there was no need to use force, much less lethal force. And none of the at least
eight other officers fired a single round. Van Dyke was placed on paid desk duty, par for the
course, and months went by as the investigation unfolded. The year 2015 was a difficult one for
the first-term Emanuel. He found himself in a tight, unexpected primary runoff against Jesus
“Chuy” Garcia, and the McDonald case loomed large in the minds of voters—who had not yet
seen the video. In a March 6, 2015, letter to city officials, a McDonald family attorney wrote: “I
submit the graphic dash-cam video will have a powerful impact on any jury and the Chicago
community as a whole. This case will undoubtedly bring a microscope of national attention to
the shooting itself as well as the City’s pattern, practice and procedures in rubber-stamping fatal
police shootings of African Americans as ‘justified’ (file 1, p. 92).” The parenthetical citation
refers to a system created in order to catalog some 3,000 pages of e-mails and other city
records provided by the mayor’s office in response to open-record requests on the Laquan
McDonald shooting. The “catalog,” which is referenced in the January 5, 2016, edition of In
These Times, crediting several contributors who helped the news organization compile it, is
damning. It makes clear that the mayor’s office knew of the dash-cam footage two months after
the shooting—yet failed to make it public until ordered to do so by a Cook County judge. It
confirms that the mayor and city council agreed to cut a check for the McDonald family of $5
million, even though the family had not yet filed a wrongful death claim against the city. The
mayor’s office released the explosive video on November 24, 2015, shortly after Emanuel was
reelected to a second term. Upon the video’s release, and the public’s instant outrage over its
contents, Emanuel on December 1, 2015, fired his police superintendent, Garry McCarthy.
Demands for Emanuel’s resignation, as well as that of Cook County state’s attorney Anita
Alvarez, are growing. A grand jury indicted Officer Jason Van Dyke on six counts of first-degree
murder. On December 29, 2015, he pleaded not guilty to all charges. Abundant evidence,
contained within the catalogued e-mails and other official reports, supports the conclusion that
Emanuel and his staff were more interested in political damage control than in getting to the
bottom of the shooting. AND WHAT BECAME OF Jon Graham Burge, the police officer who,
more than any other individual, put Chicago’s police brutality and corruption on the map? In
2010, the statute of limitations having passed on his violent crime spree, he was convicted only
of perjury—reducing all the evidence, all the published findings of his violent behavior to
“allegations.” Recently released from federal prison after having served just three and a half
years, Burge is now living in Florida, where he is supported by a $54,000 per year pension, also
courtesy of Chicago taxpayers.6 Mayor Emanuel, in announcing the reparations package, said,
“Jon Burge’s actions are a disgrace—to Chicago, to the hardworking men and women of the
police department, and most importantly to those he was sworn to protect. Today, we stand
together as a city to try and right those wrongs, and to bring this dark chapter of Chicago’s
history to a close.”7 WHAT ARE THE CHANCES this “dark chapter” of the great city’s past will
be brought to a satisfactory close? A few years ago, I was retained by plaintiffs’ counsel in a
Chicago case alleging a widespread practice of arresting witnesses. As in handcuffing them,
transporting them to police facilities, often against their will, hooking them to concrete benches,
withholding food and water, denying access to counsel, as well as family, and holding them for
hours if not days. The case went to trial, which ended in a “mixed verdict,” although the federal
judge did mandate certain changes in the department’s handling of witnesses. In November
2015, I asked Craig Futterman, clinical professor of law, founder and director of the Civil Rights
and Police Accountability Project at the University of Chicago Law School, and plaintiff’s
counsel in the case, for an assessment of how the CPD’s practices have changed since the
verdict. Here’s what he told me: From my perspective, Chicago continues to maintain a
decades-long practice of denying individuals access to an attorney while they are being held in
interrogation rooms—the time that people most need to know about their rights and
responsibilities and the time that they are most often vulnerable to abuse. While the means
have changed over time (the latest stem from CPD’s practice of denying prisoners access to
phones until they are placed in lock-up, after an interrogation has been completed), the results
have been the same. Virtually no one held in Chicago police stations gets access to a lawyer.
The mistreatment of witnesses was a subset of this broader practice. The CPD often pretended
that suspects were “witnesses” to deny them their right to counsel. The consent decree that we
won some years back has mostly ended that practice, but the Department has found other ways
to deny people their right to lawyers. Using a lawsuit against the CPD, the Guardian revealed
the scope of these egregious patterns and practices: Police “disappeared” more than 7,000
people at an off-the-books interrogation warehouse [the notorious Homan Square] in Chicago,
nearly twice as many detentions as previously disclosed, the Guardian can now reveal. From
August 2004 to June 2015, nearly 6,000 of those held at the facility were black, which
represents more than twice the proportion of the city’s population. But only 68 of those held
were allowed access to attorneys or a public notice of their whereabouts, internal police records
show. The new disclosures, the result of an ongoing Guardian transparency lawsuit and
investigation, provide the most detailed, full-scale portrait yet of the truth about Homan Square,
a secretive facility that Chicago police have described as little more than a low-level narcotics
crime outpost where the mayor has said police “follow all the rules.”8 Please, Mayor Emanuel,
you seem to have done the right thing in the Burge case. Political considerations aside, you
helped, financially, the family of Laquan McDonald. But no police department anywhere follows
all the rules. Indeed, the November 2015 release of a study of police discipline within your
police department might cause a cynic to ask if anyone follows the rules in Chicago. The
nonprofit Invisible Institute (a “journalistic production company” on Chicago’s South Side that
works to “enhance the capacity of civil society to hold public institutions accountable”) and the
Mandel Legal Aid Clinic of the University of Chicago Law School battled the City of Chicago for
ten years before they were able to bring to light the police department’s record of internal
accountability. One subject in the story of police discipline is Officer Jerome Finnegan. In his
eighteen years with the CPD, he had amassed a total of sixty-eight citizen complaints, mostly
for illegal searches and excessive force. In 2011, he confessed to robbing criminal suspects
during his tour with the elite Special Operations Section (SOS). He and other rogue cops
committed numerous street robberies, home invasions, and miscellaneous other crimes. Upon
learning that a fellow cop intended to turn him in, he ordered a hit on the officer. Finnegan was
convicted and sentenced to twelve years in prison.9 Jerome Finnegan was but one of
thousands of CPD officers who, despite having been the subject of numerous citizen
complaints, went unchecked and undisciplined for years. This is where cops everywhere
interject: “We’re talking about complaints here, not sustained allegations. Good cops, working in
high-crime areas, get complaints. Besides, as every cop knows, lodging a complaint against an
arresting officer is a common defense ploy. Get busted, say, for street dealing, why not beef the
cop? Maybe the charge goes away, or at least gets reduced.” The problem with that analysis is
revealed in the Chicago study’s numbers. During a five-year period, 97 percent of the 28,500
citizen complaints of officer misconduct resulted in exactly no discipline. Of the thousands of
complaints for 2015, more than 99 percent resulted in no punishment. And, the numbers on
racial disparities are as predictable as they are dispiriting: of those few who received discipline,
African American cops were punished at twice the rate of their white counterparts for the same
offense; and, though black citizens filed most of the complaints, white citizens were much more
likely to have theirs’ sustained.10 It’s not just the numbers that should keep Chicago’s mayor
and police superintendent awake nights. Finnegan had this to say, as he entered his guilty plea:
“My bosses knew what I was doing out there, and it went on and on. And this wasn’t the
exception to the rule. This was the rule.”11 LIKE FORMER MAYOR DALEY, the muchdecorated Burge remains unrepentant. He recently wrote in response to a cop blog, “I find it
hard to believe that the City’s political leadership could even contemplate giving ‘Reparations’ to
human vermin like them.”12 It is apparent, given these new revelations, that the “Burge Purge”
does not signal an end to the violence done to the citizens of Chicago, their humanity, their civil
liberties. When a police department is shown to be in systemic, if not sweeping violation of its
citizens’ rights, one can only assume that that agency has elected to rewrite the rules or to
throw away the rule book—also known as the Constitution. JUST AS TOP-FLIGHT DEFENSE
attorneys force patrol cops and detectives to become better investigators, so too do citizens
who stand up for their constitutional rights. The police are trying to do a job, and like many
others, if there’s a dubious or “technical” shortcut that will ease their workload or get them to a
quick solution, some will take it. If they meet no resistance, a vacuum is created—into which
additional officers are more than happy to step, thereby shaping, indeed corrupting the culture
and fostering erosion of civil liberties for all. And that means it’s in everyone’s best interest for all
citizens to know their rights, and to flex them. THERE ARE MANY ORGANIZATIONS that can
help individuals protect their civil liberties: the ALCU, of course, but also People for the
American Way, the NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People),
Cato Institute, National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, National Association for
Civilian Oversight of Law Enforcement, Friends Committee on National Legislation, The
Constitution Project, and hundreds of others, left, right, libertarian, and nonaligned. Some
emphasize civil liberties, others civil rights. The distinction between liberties and rights is not
insignificant, although both terms appear in the Declaration of Independence and in the Bill of
Rights. Civil rights guarantee equal treatment under the law. For example, a person cannot be
discriminated against because of age, gender, gender identity, sexual orientation, race,
nationality, ethnicity, disability, or religious beliefs. From the beginning, the nation’s police have
been involved in either helping or, too often, hindering—with crushing efficiency—the progress
of civil rights in America. Civil liberties are most identified with the Bill of Rights, and they include
the right to assemble, to engage in free speech, to bear arms (as decided by the “comma”
argument of the Second Amendment), and to be free from unreasonable searches and
seizures. Again, although American police forces are required by law to protect their fellow
citizens’ civil liberties, they are often found to be in violation of them. It may be a little scary, if
not terrifying to contemplate, but it is vital that Americans understand and assert their inviolable
rights in every encounter with the police. At a very minimum, willingness to report abusive police
behavior is essential. One organization, founded by Steve Silverman, is Flex Your Rights, which
has developed “Ten Rules for Dealing with Police.”13 The rules are practical, legally sound,
easy to digest. And I’m convinced that the organization’s forty-minute film, narrated by
acclaimed criminal defense attorney (and actor in The Wire) William “Billy” Murphy, will help
close the gap between the premise and the practice of civil liberties in this country. The film is
available with both Spanish and Arabic subtitles. I’ve reproduced the “top ten” list below, but I
highly recommend watching the movie to see how each plays out in realistic, well-staged, finely
performed scenarios. In November 2015, Silverman was kind enough to expand on each of his
rules. I’ve recorded his personal commentary here, in italics: 1.Always be calm and cool. A bad
attitude guarantees a bad outcome. If you keep your cool, chances are the officer will, too. 2.
Cops can lie. Don’t get tricked. Police are allowed to lie to you. Don’t let false threats or
promises trick you into waiving your rights. 3.Don’t agree to a search. Ever. Saying “no” to
searches is your constitutional right and probably your best move. Cops might search you
anyway if you refuse—but your refusal can protect you later if you end up in court. 4.Don’t just
wait. Ask: “Am I free to go?” Asking to leave shows that you’re not agreeing to the police stop.
This can protect you if you end up in court. 5.Don’t do shady stuff in public. Making dumb
decisions in public is the easiest way to find yourself in jail. Always think before you act,
especially when other people are watching. 6.Don’t admit anything. Remain silent. Cops aren’t
looking for an explanation; they’re looking for evidence. Don’t give them any. 7.Ask for a lawyer.
Trying to talk your way out of trouble with police is a big mistake. If you’re being interrogated or
you’re under arrest, calmly and clearly state, “I’m going to remain silent. I want a lawyer.”
Repeat if necessary. 8.Don’t let them in without a warrant. With few exceptions, police need a
warrant to enter your home. Unless you called for help, there’s generally no good reason to let
police into your home. 9.Don’t panic. Report misconduct later. Pay attention to detail. Write
down everything you saw and heard. If you plan to sue or complain, don’t tell the officer. 10.
FILM the police! If you want to prove police misconduct, video evidence is the best evidence.
You have the right to record the police in all fifty states. We might want to add an eleventh rule:
Never touch a police officer, and keep your hands in sight. Words to live by. Friend and
colleague Neill Franklin, executive director of Law Enforcement Against Prohibition and retired
Baltimore and Maryland state police commander, reviewed a similar film (BUSTED: The
Citizen’s Guide to Surviving Police Encounters) produced by Silverman’s organization and had
this to say, “I’m a cop. I’m straight from the streets. One of the things I always talked [about] with
police academy instructors . . . is to ensure we follow our oath, to serve and uphold the
Constitution of the United States. Most people think . . . [the “Ten Rules”] is for kids and [noncop] grown-ups, but I see it as a great tool for police academies.”14 So do I. There’s value in
having new recruits learn about the conduct of cops like Jon Burge and Jerome Finnegan, as a
cautionary tale. And for them to understand and appreciate that gross violations of civil liberties
almost always start with small, seemingly innocuous acts—along the lines of the “You-don’tmind-if-I-search-your-car?” ploy I employed as a rookie—that have become second nature to so
many cops. PREVENTING CIVIL-LIBERTIES VIOLATIONS AND other police misconduct—and
effectively confronting them when they happen—is a critical and multifaceted proposition. And
it’s complicated by deeply conflicted, real-world priorities. The city of Chicago, for example, is
reeling from round after round of gun violence. Its homicide rate in 2015 was up 20 percent over
2014. On November 2, 2015, an adorable nine-year-old fourth-grader, Tyshawn Lee, was shot
multiple times in the back and head as he played on a swing, targeted to avenge an earlier
gang-related shooting.15 Mayor Emanuel’s response, in part, has been to blame groups
agitating for greater police accountability. Not for the murders, but for creating a “chilling effect”
on the initiative of his police officers. In an October 2015 meeting of top law enforcement and
elected officials (a meeting that was to have been closed to the press but which was penetrated
by a reporter from the Washington Post), the mayor told Attorney General Loretta Lynch that
cops are going “fetal,” the result of their fear of being persecuted, or prosecuted, for doing their
jobs. I understand the impulse. When people are dying in your city, Mr. Mayor, when babies and
elementary school children are being gunned down, you want the cops to do something, to put
an end to the violence. But remarks like that one, from the city’s top official, aren’t helpful.16
What is helpful is perspective. The 20 percent increase in murders in 2015? It followed a record
low in 2014.17 It would be nice, of course, if the electorate understood that reality, if the citizens
of Chicago understood that crime rates, including murder rates, fluctuate in their city as in every
city. That way, perhaps, they would not put undue political pressure on an official whose
livelihood is contingent on votes. They would, instead, judge their mayor on his ability to fight
crime and keep his cops under control. Nobody said it would be easy, Mr. Mayor. HOW DOES
A COMMUNITY and its police department, committed both to effective crime fighting and to
constitutional, transparent, and accountable policing meet this challenge? The answer is threepronged: supervision, peer pressure, and external forces.
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