Occupied Territory Quotes

“The criminalization of black property violence in the sixties, compared with the failure to assertively criminalize white interpersonal violence in the fifties, is worth remembering.”
― Simon Balto, Occupied Territory: Policing Black Chicago from Red Summer to Black Power

“In the face of the Depression’s ravages, Chicago criminalized human misery.”
― Simon Balto, Occupied Territory: Policing Black Chicago from Red Summer to Black Power

“In the buildup to the 1919 riot, for instance, Wells had implored the city to do something to punish white terrorists targeting black homes for bombing. As we have seen, they did nothing.”
― Simon Balto, Occupied Territory: Policing Black Chicago from Red Summer to Black Power

“But representation is not the same thing as power, and the hiring of a few black officers was an ambiguous victory.”
― Simon Balto, Occupied Territory: Policing Black Chicago from Red Summer to Black Power

“The dentist wiggled the drill from side to side as the prisoner writhed in pain. The officers pledged to have him do the same to every last tooth in the suspect’s head. The suspect confessed.”
― Simon Balto, Occupied Territory: Policing Black Chicago from Red Summer to Black Power

“depriving prisoners of sleep, banging rubber hoses across a suspect’s abdomen, placing a box over an individual’s head and filling it with tear gas, applying acid to genitals, hanging prisoners upside down by their ankles or beating them with poles to the point of eyeball dislocation and blindness”
― Simon Balto, Occupied Territory: Policing Black Chicago from Red Summer to Black Power

“Police containment of vice to black neighborhoods had other effects, as well. For one, it reinforced racist perceptions of black people as unfit for urban life.”
― Simon Balto, Occupied Territory: Policing Black Chicago from Red Summer to Black Power

“while twice as many blacks than whites had been murdered and injured in the riot, twice as many blacks were arrested and indicted.”
― Simon Balto, Occupied Territory: Policing Black Chicago from Red Summer to Black Power

“By 1970 the CPD’s budget was more than 900 percent larger than in 1945, approaching $200 million per year. By the mid-seventies, the city was spending one-quarter of its budget on its police.46 It bears knowing that it was over the course of that same period that the urban crisis began to wreak further havoc on black Chicago’s educational infrastructure, housing markets, and employment sectors, hurling citizens on the margins into deeper states of deprivation and desperation. And it is surely worth considering that as that happened, the one major investment that Daley and the city council made in those neighborhoods was to send in more police.”
― Simon Balto, Occupied Territory: Policing Black Chicago from Red Summer to Black Power

“The most explosive growth of police power would not come until the mid-1950s, however, and when it did, it was predictably spurred most significantly by political battles in the city.”
― Simon Balto, Occupied Territory: Policing Black Chicago from Red Summer to Black Power

“The city could have chosen to combat the effects. The Democratic machine, under Richard Daley especially, had its hands on so many different levers of power that it could have worked harder to stave off the effects of crisis. That it didn’t (and doesn’t) is a product of politicians’ priorities and political will, and of how they viewed the importance of some communities relative to others.”
― Simon Balto, Occupied Territory: Policing Black Chicago from Red Summer to Black Power

“If the Communists’ point was that the police system was part of a larger repressive apparatus, the association’s was that police officers should know the distinction between upstanding and troublesome members of the community.”
― Simon Balto, Occupied Territory: Policing Black Chicago from Red Summer to Black Power

“There is no evidence that a critical mass of black people sought the actual overthrow of capitalism itself, so much as they sought a way to live with some modicum of stability and comfort.”
― Simon Balto, Occupied Territory: Policing Black Chicago from Red Summer to Black Power

“(It is worth noting too that the 1930s NAACP took a zero-sum outlook on black politics: either they would lead the fight for black rights, or the Communists would.”
― Simon Balto, Occupied Territory: Policing Black Chicago from Red Summer to Black Power

“Weekly if not daily during the worst throes of the Depression, black Chicagoans confronted a rapacious economic order, a racist relief system, and relentless city-sanctioned police violence, and they refused to be broken by it.”
― Simon Balto, Occupied Territory: Policing Black Chicago from Red Summer to Black Power

“Invoking a trope common among anti-Communists, he ridiculed radical activity as the fault of “outside agitators,” rather than the organic response of angry and desperate people.”
― Simon Balto, Occupied Territory: Policing Black Chicago from Red Summer to Black Power

“Prefiguring practices that will sound very familiar to modern observers, Stege’s officers stopped and searched cars at random and busted down the doors of private residences throughout the South Side’s black neighborhoods.”
― Simon Balto, Occupied Territory: Policing Black Chicago from Red Summer to Black Power

“Thwarting standard assumptions about machine politicians exchanging favors for votes, Cermak’s approach to black Chicago relied on sticks, not carrots. And he charged CPD officers with carrying the sticks.”
― Simon Balto, Occupied Territory: Policing Black Chicago from Red Summer to Black Power

“The policy enterprise kept legitimate businesses alive, charities open, and pride intact in the possibility of black autonomy, since most elite policy wheel owners (commonly known simply as policy kings or kingpins) proved willing to reinvest their windfall profits back into the community”
― Simon Balto, Occupied Territory: Policing Black Chicago from Red Summer to Black Power

“Imagine the plight of the fourteen-year-old Chicago boy, shot in the leg by a storeowner and subsequently arrested by CPD officers after he was caught trying to steal something to eat.”
― Simon Balto, Occupied Territory: Policing Black Chicago from Red Summer to Black Power

“Indeed, for the first two years of the Depression, the CPD didn’t even log (or, at least, didn’t make publicly available) what are called “offenses known to the police”— essentially, reported crime.”
― Simon Balto, Occupied Territory: Policing Black Chicago from Red Summer to Black Power

“Cermak believed that public order needed to be maintained at all costs — a vision that Ed Kelly would inherit.”
― Simon Balto, Occupied Territory: Policing Black Chicago from Red Summer to Black Power

“As this and the following chapters should make clear, there is an interrogation to be made about what happens when marginalized citizens seek justice and, in so doing, disrupt the status quo.”
― Simon Balto, Occupied Territory: Policing Black Chicago from Red Summer to Black Power

“Seeing these activities as affronts to public order, politicians and police forces responded.”
― Simon Balto, Occupied Territory: Policing Black Chicago from Red Summer to Black Power

“The study was also devoid of any finding that indicated that those police problems extended to racism, abuse, or harassment. Anything that ran contrary to the CCC’s tough-on-crime philosophy was left unexplored.”
― Simon Balto, Occupied Territory: Policing Black Chicago from Red Summer to Black Power

“A new organization, the Chicago Citizens’ Police Committee, was thus convened to conduct that study, and brought together some of Chicago’s leading lights in criminology, law, and sociology.119 That committee was not predisposed to meaningful racial empathy.”
― Simon Balto, Occupied Territory: Policing Black Chicago from Red Summer to Black Power

“commission members launched their own crime database”
― Simon Balto, Occupied Territory: Policing Black Chicago from Red Summer to Black Power

“The time has come when the police of this city must be made to realize that the constitutional rights of the commonest citizen cannot be trampled upon with impunity. The time has come for a redistribution of justice.”
― Simon Balto, Occupied Territory: Policing Black Chicago from Red Summer to Black Power

“Being a child couldn’t even keep you safe.”
― Simon Balto, Occupied Territory: Policing Black Chicago from Red Summer to Black Power

“South Side life could be traumatizing for the thousands of citizens who wanted to avoid the loitering, gambling, prostitution, drug use, and drinking that spread as a consequence of city policy and inequality.”
― Simon Balto, Occupied Territory: Policing Black Chicago from Red Summer to Black Power