CRIME FICTIONS

Fierce condemnation of a justice system that systematically commits injustices against nonwhite defendants.

Continuing her book Crook County (2016) and its pointed concluding question—“What if the numbers that we understand as mass incarceration are, in actuality, mass wrongful convictions?”—sociologist Gonzalez Van Cleve looks into a pattern of Chicago police investigations of crimes allegedly committed by Black and Latino youth. Once the prevailing tactic was to beat these young people into confessing crimes that they had nothing to do with; now the techniques have shifted to the psychological but are just as terrifying. The fundamental assumption on the part of the investigators, she charges, is that these minority youth are guilty, if not of the crime in question then of some other crime, and that minority communities are havens of depravity. That’s an old trope that seems ingrained in police culture, a “racist fiction” that lends Chicago and Illinois the distinction of leading the nation in wrongful convictions, as well as outsize rates of arrest in those communities. The author writes that these produce twin traumas, the first of being falsely arrested and thrust into the carceral state, the second of not being believed and “of being told or gaslit into thinking that what happened is something you deserved.” These traumas are lifelong and are never likely to be addressed by a system in which the police and prosecuting attorneys seldom admit error. In the end, after recounting numerous cases of injury, wrongful arrest and conviction, suppression of exculpatory evidence, and other tactics, Gonzales Van Cleve arrives at the same point with which she opens her book: “Police are not the crime fighters you think they are. They are the perpetrators of wrongful convictions, meting out a type of vigilante justice that just so happens to be woven into the fabric of our criminal justice system.”

A disturbing register of crimes committed by those who are supposed to shield us from crime.