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On February 9, 1982, an unidentified black man was placed under arrest in connection with a burglary in Chicago’s Gresham neighborhood. During the confrontation, the man overpowered the arresting officer, took his gun, and shot him in the brain from 6 inches away. He then whirled and shot his partner in the left hip and left shoulder. After an accomplice disarmed the second officer, the two fled. Both officers died on the scene. The police of Area 2 (where the crime occurred) were understandably outraged, and embarked on a campaign to track down the killers. Unfortunately, their commanding detective at the time was a man named Jon Burge. The name inspires fear in the heart of any longtime Chicago resident, as it very well should. Burge, under this noble cause, led a manhunt with interrogation techniques that included the slow murder of pets in front of detainees, handcuffing suspects for days at a time, and placing handguns against the heads of children as young as 12 (Conroy, Reader). Jesse Jackson and Renault Robinson, leader of a black police union, compared the events to a lynch mob and a war zone. Eventually, Andrew and Jackie Wilson were fingered as the shooters and arrested. Andrew was arrested at 6 am on February 14, 1982. At 10 pm that night, he was in Mercy Hospital with 15 separate injuries, including burns, lacerations, and shocks. Burge had both arrested Wilson and led his interrogation. Wilson had also confessed in that 16 hour period, a confession that led to a death sentence. Wilson spent the next two decades imprisoned, repeatedly voicing his concern with what had happened to him on a snowy day in 1982. He claimed he was beaten with fists, clubs, and guns, that he was cut skin deep with switchblades and razors, that he was electrocuted multiple times at the tips of his fingers, the end of his nose, his earlobes, and the head of his penis, and that he was burned with cigarettes and a radiator on the chest and legs while he was restrained. Initially, his claims were taken as evidence of one man losing control around a despicable villain, and trials against Burge, along with his accomplices, ended with acquittals or hung juries.

Immediately following, the trickle of whispered torture claims against Area 2 police became a flood, and (usually black) sympathetic cops, along with innocent and guilty victims, released statements detailing the abuse they’d faced at the hands of Burge and his flunkies. All victims had similar, if not the same, stories and the evidence to back it up. Many, including Wilson, discussed having plastic bags placed over their heads to almost the point of suffocation, and then removed. Many claimed Burge had taken them to the roof and dangled them over, threatening all the while to let go. Others described cattle prods and flashlights in rectums, and bolt cutters or garden shears removing fingertips. Burge was not convicted of a crime until 2010, when all this first came to my attention.

Burge is the perfect example of an American sociopath that slipped through the cracks. He graduated a Chicago high school with decent grades in 1966 and dropped out of University of Missouri his freshman year. He then volunteered to go to Vietnam, where he was allegedly taught “enhanced interrogation” techniques by the Army. In fact, an old Army interrogation technique is to use a hand cranked telephone to deliver shocks, a technique allegedly used by Burge in the 80’s. He was given the Bronze Star, two valor commendations, and a Purple Heart during his two tours. He returned to Chicago in 1969 and became a policeman in 1970, earning 13 commendations and a letter of service from the Justice Department in his 25 year long career. Beneath all that, a darker side began to surface. Claims that Burge tortured or killed Vietnamese civilians in the late 60’s filtered throughout the city. Accusations from cops claimed that almost everyone in the department knew some level of Burge’s discrepancies, and yet no one acted. Others said moving Burge from Violent crimes to the Bomb Squad in 1986 was the city silently attempting to subvert this problem. Darrell Cannon, a victim of Burge and his constituents, claimed Burge repeatedly spouted ethnic epithets and racist rhetoric.

Burge was only part of Chicago’s systemic problem with police violence. Across the city, another detective named Richard Zuley carried on Burge’s torture torch. In 1989, he kept a witness to the murder of a white woman by four black men comfortable for months, and then turned and arrested him based on the testimony of a jailhouse snitch. He falsified a confession and then kept the suspect cuffed and isolated for two days. The suspect remains in jail to this day. The next year, he arrested a Latherial Boyd for murder. Upon searching Boyd’s large and comfortable home, he remarked “no n****r is supposed to live like this.” He then forcibly coerced 2 female witnesses to pick Boyd out of a lineup. Boyd was convicted and released in 2003 after an investigation into his conviction. Lastly, he arrested Benita Johnson for murder, cuffing her to a wall at two points for more than a day. She eventually gave up her boyfriend, Andre Griggs, who was arrested the next day. Griggs was also cuffed to the wall for thirty hours, even as he went through severe heroin withdrawal without methadone. He allegedly confessed during this period.

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Video Showing Drugs and Violence's Toll on Children

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Video Showing Drugs and Violence's Toll on Children

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Violence in cities, the never changing occurrence that by now seems to naturally stem from the construct of grouping humans together in large quantities. This problem has happened throughout time and space, but currently seems to attack America in a perplexing way. Due to the legacy of slavery and segregation in American cities, race and inner city crime are now irreparably linked. The truth of the matter is, any marginalized and impoverished community will rise into crime and violence. Hurting each other quickly appears to be the obvious way to acquire wealth, and wealth is needed to better one and one’s family. It’s a natural progression to want to better your own life, and to do this in afflicted neighborhoods crime is the quickest and easiest way. Over a hundred years ago, this exact thing happened to Italian and Irish immigrants in New York and Chicago. They were relegated to mundane and ill paying jobs in overcrowded dirty neighborhoods. As a result they formed gangs, and then mobs. The mobs were brutal and operated ruthlessly, but gained power and prestige. Italians and the Irish became part of the cultural norm, but all those slums were now filled with blacks fleeing lynching and sharecropping in the South. With much less opportunity available in already overcrowded cities, poor minorities became more likely to use drugs and to commit crimes. (Mazzeno)

By the early ‘80’s, the drug link strengthened to such a degree that inner city shootings began to crack 500 a year in major cities. Mass death on this level was met with harsh punishments for small time drug dealing and use from authorities. This only added a feeling of constant danger in violence affected communities, and although it decreased inner city violence in the first decade of the 2000’s, those numbers appear to be increasing all over again. Quite simply, they were not effective long term decisions to combat urban violence. Urban communities became pockets, barely supported with failing infrastructure and largely ignored in practice by white, detached politicians. From these pockets, music began to spark. Funk and soul rose, and then puttered out because they were seen as too happy for a community jaded by generations of targeted oppression. This is the climate into which gangster rap entered and became the definitive voice of a people, so varied in texture and style that it polarized everyone and entered national politics. Black expression, of all kinds but especially of violence and poverty, has always had a passive dual relationship with popular culture. It is shunned, rejected, and then gentrified in a disgustingly cyclic pattern. Jazz, funk, tap dance, gospel, minstrels, and rock all lie in the graveyard of black expression.

In conclusion, race and violence and poverty in cities are all linked inexplicably but irrevocably. We can not break the pain of these facts, but we can help. The assault on the black body, on the poor mind, is not an unstoppable force. It just requires immediate and drastic mental change in the mind sof the rich and privileged.

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"Face it, Jerome gets more time than Brandon"
"I hate crowded beaches, I hate the sound of fireworks /And I ponder what's worse between knowing it's over and dyin' first /Cause everybody dies in the summer"
"Same shotgun that shot Ricky (see background)"
ALL of Empire State of Mind by NAS

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1600, we grab him quick and we run him west, west to the ocean
Drown in the blood of man or Earth
1700, we smack him, whip him, eat his soul
recapture to re-enslave
1860, we shoot to keep him, shoot to free him
Long as he knows he'll never be we
1910, we lynch him, string him up and rob him
We send him north and we greet him with a smile
He must remember we freed him, he must remember he'd be nothing without we
1960, we let him have a place, maybe even somewhere near us
It'll be fine till he cross Cermak
1990, he shoots himself, we smile and say what can we do?
like we didn't put him there, like we didn't leave him broke and alone
We torture him in this city
Cigarettes and clubs on his restrained knees
Clamps under his clothes and bags cover his bodies
2010, we smile and shake his hand
He's we now we say
Why he even gets to rent our White house
We listen to him on our radios, watch him on our TV's
We would never hurt him, why does he hurt him?
We must protect him from him
And while his own bullets keep him down, our bullets in him must set him free

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Conroy, John. "House of Screams." Chicago Reader. N.p., 25 Jan. 1990. Web. 25 Dec. 2016.
Duggan, Julian. "Police Abuse in Chicago – Part II: Abuse Continues Under Detective Richard Zuley." The Gate. N.p., 30 Apr. 2015. Web. 25 Dec. 2016.
Mazzeno, Laurence W. "Crime." Immigration to the United States. N.p., n.d. Web. 16 Dec. 2016.

Patterson, Orlando. "The Real Problem With America’s Inner Cities." The New York Times. The New York Times, 09 May 2015. Web. 12 Dec. 2016.

Thompson, Heather Ann. "Inner-City Violence in the Age of Mass Incarceration." The Atlantic. Atlantic Media Company, n.d. Web. 12 Dec. 2016.

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Inner city violence, although on a downward trend, is fueled by the drug game, unfair laws, and a basic misunderstanding of people in these violent situations, forming the most important microcosm of American issues available.

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Video showing inner city violence and its toll

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Video showing inner city violence and its toll

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This is ScHoolboy Q presenting his song JoHn Muir. Q is a 30 year old rapper from South Central Los Angeles. At age 13 he joined the Hoover Street Crips, and to tHis day he still capitalizes all his H's. However, he's since stopped gang-banging and has built a family he cares about very much. This video follows two people, based on former acquaintances of Q, as they go on a crime spree that eventually ends in their demise. Q appears for about 10 seconds starting at 0:31 in the capacity he appeared in in the real story, hearing the boys brag about petty crimes but doing nothing to stop them. This is his expression of regret, to him, to them, to anyone who cares. He lived the life and he's trying to move on, and this is why. Living in vice is fun, but it ends poorly. All the vice fuels the death, the shooting and the thieving.

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Music video by ScHoolboy Q performing JoHn Muir. (C) 2016 Interscope Records (Top Dawg Entertainment) http://vevo.ly/YGVtNs