Chicago - A message from the station manager

The [Tuesday] Papers

By Steve Rhodes

“It has been a decade since [Jamie] Galvan’s mysterious death in custody at Homan Square. His family feels frozen in time. An official autopsy report concluded that Galvan, who had been arrested for selling cocaine, had died after ingesting narcotics. Family and friends arrested alongside Galvan, backed by independent forensic evidence, tell a different story,” the Guardian reports today.
“Galvan’s official autopsy contrasts in significant ways with an independent one the family ordered as part of a failed police brutality lawsuit. Chicago police even gave the media the wrong place of his death.
“But a Guardian transparency lawsuit has revealed Galvan as the second person known to have died in police custody at Homan Square.”


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Nearly every family claims their deceased did nothing wrong, or didn’t do drugs, or wasn’t in a gang, and so on. But please read this – the discrepancies in the reports are stark, and reminiscent of recent events surrounding the Chicago Police Department. The CPD, by the way, again refused to answer a single question. They always do when it comes to Homan Square, and the local media doesn’t seem to mind. It’s like a don’t ask-don’t tell zone has been declared around that place by the Chicago press corps because they got beat like a drum – and somehow that means the CPD is mysteriously telling the truth (and only through non-responsive canned statements) about just this one thing: Homan Square.
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Previously in Homan Square:
* The [Monday] Papers: Suddenly, the CPD is a fine upstanding trustworthy institution.
* The Beachwood Radio Hour #46: Explaining Chicago’s Black Site.
* The [Wednesday] Papers: Another day, another Guardian story.
* The [Thursday] Papers: John Conroy vs. the Chicago media. Again.
* The Beachwood Radio Hour #47: What Chicagoans Aren’t Being Told.
* The Beachwood Radio Hour #48: Carol Marin’s Blinders & What Tom Durkin Really Said.
* The [Monday] Papers: Homan Squared.
* Chicago Politicians Push DOJ To investigate ‘CIA Or Gestapo Tactics’ At Secret Police Site.
* Chicago’s Homan Square: Torture By Any Other Name . . .
* Amnesty International Calls For Federal Investigation Of Homan Square.
* The [Wednesday] Papers: Public Hearings Ignored By Chicago Media.
* The [Monday] Papers: Records Document Physical Abuse At Homan.
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‘A Machinery Of Denial’
“Chicago police officer Gil Sierra shot three black men in six months and stayed on the force. This is how the city with more police shootings than any other in America circles its wagons,” BuzzFeed reports in a long examination of yet another, separate case.
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The way many longtime Chicago residents saw it, the system worked exactly the way it always had. Officers have lied in police reports and intimidated witnesses – and the city’s public authorities have protected them.
“These are policies and practices of institutional denial and secrecy so deeply ingrained as normal here in Chicago,” said Craig Futterman, a University of Chicago Law School professor who has studied policing in America. “This isn’t anything new. This is an entrenched systemic practice. A machinery of denial.”
The city government and police have been caught in high-profile lies before. After a police raid killed Black Panther leader Fred Hampton in 1969, local authorities falsely claimed that officers opened fire in self-defense. Police commander Jon Burge tortured dozens of suspects from the 1970s to the 1990s: The city and the department denied allegations, in at least two court cases, that Burge oversaw the beatings and electrocutions, and the denials continued for years before the city apologized in 2015, reaching a $5.5 million settlement with more than 50 victims. There was the Laquan McDonald shooting in 2014: For more than a year, Mayor Rahm Emanuel and State’s Attorney Anita Alvarez withheld from the public video footage that conflicted with the statements given by every officer at the scene, who all claimed the 17-year-old lunged with a knife before Officer Jason Van Dyke opened fire.
“You couldn’t have the code of silence here if the higher-up police officials, the state’s attorney, and assistant state’s attorneys, and the judges all didn’t work together in one for this to keep going,” said Flint Taylor, a longtime civil rights lawyer in the city.
This culture of protection and secrecy begins with police rank and file and spreads throughout the city’s institutions. The code of silence in the Chicago Police Department “is more observably entrenched and has been more difficult to break” than at other departments across the country, said Futterman.

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Meanwhile, the city council is working this week on a “one-time exception” codifying Rahm Emanuel’s decision to violate ordinance and hire a rank-and-file cop’s cop who says he has never seen misconduct in 27 years on the force as the new police chief. Way to meet the moment. Shaking my damn head.
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Whose Ghetto?
Ghettos are created – and maintained.
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Tax Day: Patriotic Millionaires Available For Comment
Traitors to their class.
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Meet The Adler’s New Vice President Of Astronomy!
Dude’s actually a geographer.
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Breaking: Coffman Concedes On Cubs!
“I’ve had massive reservations about the way this Cub team has been built. And I’ve gone on and on about them. Tanking three seasons was not OK with me, especially given ownership’s unwillingness to throw fans the tiniest of bones. (Would it have killed ya to knock a buck off the price of a ticket when the team was losing on purpose? We know the billionaire Ricketts family would have somehow survived the financial hit.)
“When people yammered at me about Theo Epstein’s glorious ‘Plan,’ I always pointed out that a big part of it was Ricky Renteria.”
But . . .
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Testing, Testing, 1, 2, Inifinity
I had occasion to dig up this 1999 Newsweek cover story – I did the Chicago reporting for it. Quite revealing to look back at it now. Also, several familiar names.


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Follow the Twitter thread to see a little about how far back my own history opposing standardized testing mania goes. (Hint: All the way back!)
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BeachBook
Uber Assigns Its IP To Bermuda, Leaving Less Than 2% Of Its Revenue Taxable By The U.S.

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Target Field Food News The Shirt-Stained, Artery-Clogged Media Won’t Tell You.

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Change You Can’t Believe In? Coin-Counting Machines May Shortchange You.

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TweetWood


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The Beachwood Tip Line: Take the Lemon Pledge.

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Posted on April 12, 2016