Crook County

Content Warning: The source material addresses racism and racial inequity in the US criminal justice system. References to racial degradation, including the use of the N-word, and racial violence appear throughout the text.

Crook County: Racism and Injustice in America’s Largest Criminal Court was published in 2016, three years after the start of Black Lives Matter (BLM) Movement, a decentralized sociopolitical movement seeking to redress racism, racial injustice, and racial violence in the United States and abroad. BLM started 2013 in response to the highly publicized acquittal of George Zimmerman in the fatal shooting Trayvon Martin, a Black teenager walking to a family friend’s home in a gated Florida community. The hashtag #BlackLivesMatters started trending on social media. BLM gained momentum after a series of high-profile cases of police violence against Black people, including the choking death of Eric Garner in New York City (July 2014); the fatal shooting of 18-year-old Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri (August 2014); and the fatal shooting of 14-year-old Tamir Rice in Cleveland, Ohio (November 2014). Between 2014 and 2016, the founders of BLM, Alicia Garza, Ayọ Tometi, and Patrisse Cullors, expanded the movement to a national network of more than 30 local chapters. The murder of George Floyd, a 46-year-old Black man, by a white Minneapolis police officer in 2020 thrust BLM back into the national spotlight. Approximately 26 million people participated in BLM protests that year, making it one of the largest social movements in the county’s history (“Killing of Eric Garner.” Wikipedia).

Gonzalez Van Cleve addresses police violence and BLM in Chapter 4, calling the police killings of Rice, Brown, and Garner “a symbolic triad—a black child, a young man, and a middle-aged father—all killed by police officers on American streets” (144). Grand juries in all three cases declined to indict the officers responsible for the deaths, underscoring the need for greater police accountability and criminal justice reform. These cases of police brutality and racial injustice are of a piece with the racialized injustice Gonzalez Van Cleve documents in Cook County.

Exemplary in this regard is the case of Jon Burges, a Chicago police commander who used torture to coerce confessions out of more than 120 Black men from the 1970s to the early 1990s. Despite ample evidence, including graphic victim statements, state prosecutors never charged Burges for these crimes. His only punishment came from federal charges of obstruction of justice and perjury. In short, Burges served four and a half years in federal prison for running what amounted to a decades-long “torture ring” out of Chicago’s police stations (144).

The example of Burges, alongside those of Rice, Brown, and Garner, provides the context for Crook County: Racism and Injustice in America’s Largest Criminal Court. Gonzalez Van Cleve started her research at the Cook County Courts as an undergraduate in the early 2000s. She revisited the courthouse as a graduate student, completing 104 interviews with public defenders, prosecutors, and judges, and supplementing her research with 1,000 hours of observations from 130 court watchers trained in data collecting (xiii). Her book, the product of 10 years of field work, not only captures the racial inequities of the Cook County Courts, but also conveys the pressing need for criminal justice reform. For Gonzalez Van Cleve, reforming the criminal justice system requires bearing witness en masse to racialized court practices. She urges readers to go to the courts to disrupt racialized justice’s “stronghold on criminal law” (190).