Cop wrote city’s ‘dark chapter’
JON Burge (70) was the former detective commander whose name became synonymous with the Chicago Police Department’s sordid legacy of misconduct and abuse.
Details about his death in Florida on September 19 were scarce. Union officials and family members declined to speak with members of the news media, which spent years reporting on the cases in which Burge was accused of torturing suspects in order to obtain confessions.
Burge was fired from the Chicago Police Department in 1993 over allegations of misconduct, but he was never charged directly with those alleged crimes. Instead he was convicted of lying to federal authorities about his conduct and sentenced to prison in 2010. He was released in 2014 and returned to his waterfront home south of Tampa.
Dean Angelo, former head of the Fraternal Order of Police in Chicago, said he heard during a break in the murder trial of Officer Jason Van Dyke that Burge had died.
‘‘It came as kind of a shock,’’ Angelo told reporters in the lobby of the Leighton Criminal Court Building.
‘‘Jon Burge put a lot of bad guys in prison that belonged . . . in prison,’’ he said.
‘‘People picked a career apart that was considered for a long time to be an honourable career and a very effective career. I don’t know that Jon Burge got a fair shake based on the years and years of service that he gave the city. But we’ll have to wait and see how that eventually plays out in history.’’
Burge and detectives under his command were alleged to have tortured and abused more than 100 suspects into falsely confessing to murder and other crimes in the 1970s and 1980s.
At his trial on perjury and obstruction of justice charges, a number of former convicts testified about Burge’s use of cattle prods on genitals, plastic to suffocate suspects and phone books to beat them.
The city and Cook County have spent nearly $US100 million combined on Burgerelated settlements and legal fees.
In 2013, Mayor Rahm Emanuel issued an unexpected public apology for the stain Burge had left on the city, calling it a ‘‘dark chapter’’ that needed to be put in the past. — Chicago Tribune