A Digital Archive Documents Two Decades of Torture by Chicago Police

The Chicago Police Department seems to be continuously embroiled these days in multiple, high-profile investigations of fatal incidents, corruption scandals, and mishandling of critical equipment. Now, the CPD will have to contend with an online, 10,000-document-strong archive of an even more troubling time in its history: the notorious two decades in which officers performed torture.  

The Chicago Torture Archive will open this month at the University of Chicago. The massive collection comes from efforts by the People’s Law Office, a civil-rights organization, to gather interrogations, criminal-trial files, civil-litigation documents, works of journalism, and records of activism spurred by the CPD torture cases documented between 1972 and 1991.

Briefly stated, over 100 black men were tortured by officers in order to force confessions, drive them to incriminate co-defendants, or to intimidate possible witnesses to police brutality. One of them was Philip Adkins, whose testimony about the hours that followed a 5 a.m. knock on his door is representative of some of the atrocities men like him endured at the hands of police officers. During the space of four to five hours, three detectives picked up, handcuffed, and detained Adkins without officially arresting him, reading him his Miranda rights, or allowing him to contact family or counsel.