A Reporter's Role in Revealing Police Torture

by Matt Kelley · 2008-10-23 11:51:00 UTC
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It is hard to dispute that Chicago Police detectives tortured and beat suspects in countless cases on the city's South Side in the 1970s and 1980s. The shoe finally dropped in the case this week, when the the detectives' ringleader, Jon Burge, was arrested at his Florida home for allegedly lying in a civil suit about his role in the torture.

And the Chicago Sun-Times today points to an important player in the two-decade campaign to bring some justice to this horrible situation - Chicago Reader reporter John Conroy.

Conroy wrote more than 100,000 words about the police torture scandal between the time he started looking into it in 1989 and when he was laid off last December because of budget cuts.

Although he would tell you he's only a "bit player," Conroy was probably as responsible as anyone for keeping the police torture issue in Chicago's consciousness during that time. He wrote about it and wrote about it, to the point that it probably wasn't good for his career, because nobody likes a Johnny-one-note.

His editor suggested he move on to the next subject, and he tried. After all, he told himself, he wasn't having much impact. But he kept coming back.

"It seemed be a matter of life and death," he explained. "There were guys on Death Row that were going to die."

I'm glad to see that his persistence, and the hard work of hundreds of others, has finally helped lead to Burge's arrest. History will not look well upon the the 70's and 80's in the Chicago Police Department.

Read an archive of Conroy's reporting here.

Matt Kelley is the Online Communications Manager at the Innocence Project and a graduate of the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University. Follow him on Twitter @mattjkelley.
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