One of the station houses where Chicago Police Lt. Jon G. Burge forged his reputation for brutality is a sprawling, low-slung building with royal-blue trim and glass-block walls on the Far South Side.
As second watch gave way to the third there Friday, virtually none of the police officers drifting in and out of the building remembered Burge or the horrific ways in which he and some of his detectives are said to have extracted confessions in the mid- to late 1980s. But, with Gov. George Ryan’s pardon of four condemned prisoners earlier in the day, Burge’s shadow had fallen once again over the Calumet Area headquarters.
The four prisoners Ryan pardoned were among more than 60 suspects–including nearly a dozen on Death Row–who have claimed Burge or his detectives tortured them to confess.
Ryan had harsh words for the culture of systematic abuse, much of which is said to have occurred in the building on East 111th Street, where Burge and some of his violent-crimes detectives allegedly extracted confessions by near-suffocation, beating, coercion and electric shock.
Tracey Haywood, a cop at the area headquarters, said Ryan’s comments disturbed her.
“It’s very disheartening when you’ve got the governor saying that,” Haywood said. “Just like in any job, there are good cops and bad cops. We’re not all bad. Don’t lump us all into one.”
Haywood, a 15-year veteran, said she had been injured numerous times because, rather than fighting an assailant and risking a brutality charge, she held back.
“How many times has one of us been the victim?” she said.
“I’ve definitely sustained more injuries than I’ve caused.”
To Capt. Elton McClendon, who has worked in the Calumet Area headquarters for two years, the name Burge means little.
“Nobody has spoken to me or talked to me about Jon Burge,” McClendon said.
Many officers in the district are too young to have a frame of reference for anything that happened so long ago, said Cmdr. Sidney Kelly.
“Nobody here’s said a thing. It doesn’t really bother us,” Kelly said. “Area 2 is not staffed by the people who were here years ago. It’s a non-issue for us.”
Kelly has worked in the Calumet Area headquarters for four months, he said. It has been awhile since Burge darkened these corridors.
The building is 20 years old. Its opening in the early 1980s was delayed by numerous structural and equipment problems, including inadequate soundproofing for the second-floor pistol range.
In May 1986, with the sharp end of an uncoiled paper clip, Aaron Patterson–one of the prisoners freed Friday–scratched into the metal bench of the interrogation room these words: “Aaron 4/30 I lie about murders. Police threaten me with violence. Slapped and suffocated me with plastic.”
Preparing to leave the building Friday after a day on the beat, Officers Carlos Cannon and Lyteshia Gunn-Pope shrugged off Ryan’s words and actions.
“The police get blamed for everything,” Cannon said.
“As long as we’re doing our jobs and upholding the law in the process, then his comments are unwarranted,” Gunn-Pope said.
