The torture letters : reckoning with police violence /

Ralph (Princeton Univ.), an anthropologist, explores the history and meaning of the torture inflicted on African American suspects by the Chicago police. Utilizing a series of open letters addressed to politicians, victims, and other Chicagoans, he argues that torture is a manifestation of a system of policing that normalizes and rationalizes the use of force against marginalized members of the community. Ralph describes this system as a "torture tree," rooted in racist fears of "the other," that produces a foliage of abuse and mistreatment. Police harassment, intimidation, and shootings are all leaves of this tree. Hence, simply compensating victims of police violence and condemning a few "bad apples" cannot sufficiently combat the issue. Ralph implores readers to address the problem from the roots and the branches, challenging the ideology and institutional power underlying social injustice in Chicago. The clear willingness of authorities and the public to abide mistreatment, even torture, lends this argument considerable force. While the open letter format occasionally seems strained, this approach allows the author to express his righteous anger and to make his appeal for change more directly to a wider audience. Summing Up: Highly recommended. All readership levels. --Padraic C. Kennedy, York College of Pennsylvania

In this unusually structured, deeply caring work, anthropologist Ralph (Renegade Dreams) uses research, focus groups, and interviews with nearly a hundred Chicagoans to craft a series of open letters about the "open secret" that is police torture, addressed to everyone from the future mayors of Chicago to two teenagers he saw being stopped and frisked. He tells the stories of survivors such as Andrew Wilson, the first man to file a lawsuit against the city of Chicago for torture, and torturers including the infamous police commander Jon Burge. He also tells stories of activism: that of Francine Grayson, one signer of a petition put together by the Civil Rights Congress, and the group of young activists who testified in front of the UN's Committee Against Torture in 2014. He depicts torture as a tree, with its roots in public funding of the military, branching into individual incidents of police violence. While Ralph's choice of structure is well-reasoned, it has its limitations; it allows for much more emotional language than a typical academic text, but keeps him from aiming arguments at the reader, rather than the recipients of the letters, and therefore from fully fleshing out his analysis. This is, nevertheless, an essential primer on the roots of police violence. (Sept.)

In four equally compelling parts, an anthropology professor breaks down the root causes and severe consequences of police violence against people of color in America.Ralph (Anthropology/Princeton Univ.; Renegade Dreams: Living With Injury in Gangland Chicago, 2014) adopts a personal take on police violence, framing his research and takeaways in open letters to individuals, among them future mayors of Chicago, two random schoolchildren, people who have been tortured and even killed while in police custody, and readers of this book. The epistolary narrative might seem like a bit of a gimmick, but the result is oddly moving, giving context to Ralph's subject while lending an emotional heft a more scholarly work might have lacked. In one segment of "An Open letter to Chicago's Youth of Color," he writes, "You don't know me. But I know you; or rather, I know what can happen to you. I am writing to all of you because you are the next generation who has to fear violence from the same people who are tasked with protecting you and serving you." While the author doesn't always go into specific detail, he writes in the introduction, "between 1972 and 1991, approximately 125 African American suspects were tortured by police officers in Chicago." Many of the narrative elements that Ralph chooses to highlight are chilling, most significantly "the torture tree," borrowed from Billie Holiday's eerie version of the song "Strange Fruit; and "the black box," an electrical torture device used to send shocks through a person's body as punishment or to coerce a false confession. From Francis Grayson, who was executed in the electric chair in 1951, to Dominique "Damo" Franklin, who died in 2014 after being tasered three times, hitting his head on a pole, and falling into a coma, Ralph brings necessary light to the problem of police torture.A damning indictment of the senseless and seemingly unceasing violence committed by those charged with serving the public. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.