In the late 1980s, when journalist John Conroy first began investigating claims that a decorated Chicago police detective named Jon Burge was torturing criminal suspects on the South Side, he found it virtually impossible to get his hands on police misconduct records without a court order.

Conroy’s coverage of the Burge torture allegations in the Chicago Reader, the city’s alt-weekly, would lead to the detective’s dismissal from the force in 1993 — following an internal Police Department review determining that he had tortured suspects — and Burge’s eventual conviction in 2010 on felony charges of perjury and obstruction of justice for denying his use of torture under oath. (He was released in 2014 and is now living in Florida on a police pension). 

Now, 25 years after publishing the first of many articles exposing Burge’s tangled web of abuse and secrecy — as the U.S. Justice Department sets out to investigate allegations of systemic violence and racism going unpunished within the Chicago Police Department — Conroy is part of a fight to stop the Chicago Police Department from destroying decades' worth of what he says are documents that could free scores of innocent prisoners.

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Jamie Kalven’s attorney, Craig Futterman, who serves on the commission, said justice for the victims of Burge and his associates rests on the decades’ worth of misconduct reports the police want to destroy.

“What’s at stake? Police accountability,” Futterman said. “People sitting in prison who claim that they’ve been tortured, officers who’ve been accused of abuse who are still out there. All evidence or documentation of that is at risk of being destroyed forever.”

FOP president Dean Angelo did not return multiple requests for comment on this story. 

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