Andrew Baer on the Social Movements For Police Accountability in Chicago
Police Brutality On the Front Page. Not Exactly a New Development...
In the 1970s and 1980s, a group of Chicago police officers routinely tortured criminal suspects in their custody, while fellow cops, state attorneys and elected officials looked the other way. In his book, Beyond the Usual Beating: The Jon Burge Police Torture Scandal and Social Movements For Police Accountability in Chicago (University of Chicago Press), Andrew Baer explains how the eponymous detective and others hid their violence, and the arduous struggle to get Burge fired and win reparations for survivors. He blends legal and social history with ethnography to chronicle the labyrinthine legal system that concealed this torture, and the challenges of political coalition-building across class, race, and prison walls. The result is a history of the fraying reform discourse with which we live.
__________________________________
Andrew S. Baer is assistant professor of history with a secondary appointment in African American studies at the University of Alabama at Birmingham.
Patrick Reilly studies US history, race, and civilian cooperation with police at Vanderbilt University.
New Books Network
The New Books Network is a consortium of author-interview podcast channels dedicated to raising the level of public discourse by introducing serious authors to a wide public via new media. We publish 100 new interviews every month and serve a large, worldwide audience. The NBN is staffed by Founder & Editor-in-Chief, Marshall Poe, and Co-Editor, Leann Wilson. Feel free to contact either one of us for more information.
