QUIS CUSTODIET IPSOS CUSTODES
Means "Who Polices the Police?"

From the AP via the Houston Chronicle:

Evidence Chicago police tortured suspects

Special prosecutors investigating allegations that police tortured nearly 150 black suspects in the 1970s and '80s said Wednesday they found evidence of abuse, but any crimes are now too old to prosecute.

In three of the cases, the prosecutors said the evidence was strong enough to have warranted indictments and convictions.

"It is our judgment that the evidence in those cases would be sufficient to establish guilt beyond a reasonable doubt," Robert D. Boyle and Edward J. Egan wrote.

The four-year investigation focused on allegations that 148 black men were tortured in Chicago police interrogation rooms in the 1970s and '80s. The men claimed detectives under the command of Lt. Jon Burge beat them, used electric shocks, played mock Russian roulette and started to smother at least one to elicit confessions.

Click here for the rest.

Some part of me just can't get past thinking that there ought not to be a statue of limitations on torture, but hey, I'm just a guy--what do I know? The point here is that, even though this horrible tale seems to have ended for the time being, police culture in the United States is such that such a thing, institutional police support for wholesale violation of human and civil rights, is likely to happen again. Soon, if not right now. It is important to observe that this reign of terror in Chicago didn't seem to end because the people involved were caught--I mean, this information is only just now coming to light. Actually, I don't know why it ended; the article doesn't say, but what's important is that whatever legal or institutional mechanisms, internal affairs division, whatever, that were supposed to catch this didn't work. It happened anyway.

The reason why, I think, is that the hypermasculine culture of police, which exists throughout the nation, tends to put their line of work into very stark black and white terms which utterly belie reality: cops are good guys doing whatever they can to stop the bad guys, who are potentially pretty much anybody who may get in the way; Constitutional protections for the accused are belittled and dismissed as obstacles to the good guys' mission. Thus, torture becomes acceptable within police culture--enlightened cops who may object often don't out of loyalty to their brethren, the classic "code of silence" observed by both law-enforcement agents and mafiosi.

As I've said many times, I wholeheartedly agree with the notion that society needs police--that's not what my criticism is about. But these chronic and systemic police abuses that seem to be in the headlines virtually every day make plain that something is dead wrong with the way that law enforcement is approached in this country. It is police culture, I think, with its utterly simplistic worldview and morality, along with its inherent sense of social elitism, that seems to be the unifying factor for all these cases. Until this blue uniformed group-think is addressed by the powers that be, I think I'm going to continue to be just as scared of cops as I am of criminals, who, oftentimes, are one and the same.

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