Chicago Grassroots Organization Presents Report To U.N. Torture Committee About Chicago Police Brutality
By Jon Graef in News on Nov 8, 2014 10:00PM
Chicago grassroots organization We Charge Genocide, an anti-police brutality volunteer group, travels to Geneva today in order to present a report to the United Nations Committee Against Torture about the abuses of the Chicago Police Department.
The group, named after a 1951 petition filed to the United Nations about local police, successfully crowdfunded the trip earlier this year.
We Charge Genocide will present a report it released in October titled, Police Violence Against Chicago’s Youth of Color, to the U.N. Committee Against Torture's 53rd session, which is currently taking place.
On their website, We Charge Genocide explains what they will ask of the committee:
Our delegation will urge the Committee to recognize the Chicago Police Department’s treatment of young people of color as torture; suggest federal intervention; and demand a response from the Chicago Police Department regarding how its plans to end this treatment and compensate the communities impacted by police violence.
The report outlines twelve different stories of people who have been shot and killed under questionable circumstances by the Chicago Police Department. Additionally, the report lays out some alarming statistics.
Among them are that a police "brutality complaint is 94 [percent] less likely to be sustained in Chicago" than complaints filed in the rest of the nation; that less than one percent of "brutality complaints against the CPD are sustained," as opposed to eight percent nationally; and 85 percent of the CPD's 27 shooting victims this year have been black.
On their website, organizer and educator Mariame Kaba writes about what all of the information collected adds up to:
As poets, educators, organizers, and activists who call Chicago home, this delegation will present a strong, convincing case that CPD's ongoing history of police brutality and continued practice of physical and psychological harassment of young people of color amount to torture
Kaba further writes: "Today, police violence in Chicago continues to violate human rights principles—seen in the daily harassment, abuse, and targeting of youth of color by Chicago police."
WCG has yet to present their findings to CPD itself because, as WCG member Todd St. Hill says, "we’re circumventing everyone because what we’ve done so far and what has been done so far has fallen on deaf ears."
We Charge Genocide returns from Geneva Nov. 15.
Read the report below:
We Charge Genocide Report On Chicago Police Violence by joe_erbentraut
We Charge Genocide's report comes as fights to shed light on police misconduct continue. Earlier this year, the city released police misconduct investigation files to the public at large.
Another report, also released last month, shows that "the City of Chicago fails to recognize, let alone sanction, police guilty of repeated episodes of violence, including the shooting deaths of unarmed civilians." [You can listen to a discussion of the report from WBEZ, with reporters Sarah Macaraeg and Alison Flowers, below].