Cops Under Fire

It was strange and spooky and a reminder of Chicago's lurid past. Over a five-month period the bodies of six murder victims were found bobbing in the waters of the Chicago River and the Sanitary and Ship Canal. All were black. They had been efficiently executed in gangster fashion--shot to death and dumped into the murky waterways.

What gives the killings a doubly ominous significance is the fact that some Chicago policemen are under federal investigation for their possible connection with the crimes. Some of the victims were believed to be heroin wholesalers who may have been killed for refusing to pay bribes; others could have been slain for stopping payoffs that put thousands of illicit dollars a month into police pockets.

Government informants said that some of the victims were evidently arrested by uniformed policemen and transported to their deaths in police department squad cars. Justice Department officials said that two of the victims were probably killed by mistake after they were pulled from cars owned by suspected narcotics dealers.

Last week there was a new bizarre twist: one of four policemen being questioned by his own department, Sergeant Stanley Robinson, 36, disappeared. An anonymous caller told police that a man fitting Robinson's description was kidnaped at gunpoint in the area where most of the murders were supposed to have taken place. There is some speculation that he may have staged the kidnaping to throw police and federal investigators off his trail.

The possibility of its officers dabbling in murder, bribery and narcotics was only the latest of a series of troubles plaguing the Chicago police department. Despite its excesses at the 1968 Democratic National Convention, the department had until recently been considered a much improved force by most Chicagoans. The overall reforms within the department were primarily the work of two men, California Criminologist Orlando Wilson, who served as police superintendent from 1960 to 1967, and James Conlisk Jr., a career cop who worked his way up through the ranks to take over from Wilson. Under them, the department was transformed into one of the most efficient law-enforcement units in the country. But in recent weeks it has seen its men accused of killing people at a much greater rate than the police in the nation's three other largest cities. Lately, Chicago policemen have also been indicted for participating in a shakedown operation and charged with brutality toward minority groups. The result has been a crisis in police morale and credibility. Predictably, a good many Chicagoans have lost faith in the department's ability to administer law and order.

Lost Lustre. The decline began late last year when FBI investigators discovered that some Chicago policemen were involved in a scheme to shake down tavern owners in the city's North West Side Austin police district. Nine policemen --including two lieutenants and a sergeant--and two former policemen were indicted. Four have been convicted. Fifteen additional policemen were suspended by Conlisk after they refused to talk to the grand jury about the shakedown operation. The scheme may have spread to other areas of the city; one high-ranking policeman quit his job when federal probers started looking into possible extortion by policemen in the Near North Side nightclub district.

The police are under fire on still another front. A coalition of mostly black grass-roots organizations, led by Democratic Congressman Ralph Metcalfe, has been waging an all-out campaign to end what it considers excessive police brutality. Their complaints were reinforced by a report issued by the Chicago Law Enforcement Study Group that showed Chicago police were involved in fatal shootings at a rate that is three times higher than in New York, Los Angeles and Detroit. Also, during a day-long hearing, a dozen witnesses, eleven blacks and one white, testified. Some of them told of their traumatic experiences; one man testified that he lost an eye after being hit by a police baton. The officer had been exonerated by the police internal affairs department.

Metcalfe and his followers have demanded that Conlisk disband the elite police task force unit, which they blame for much of the police brutality in black and Latin American neighborhoods. The group also called for an increase in the number of blacks in policymaking positions, the recruitment of more blacks and the across-the-board upgrading of blacks already on the force. To increase citizen control over police activities, the group has demanded that citizens' review boards be created for each of the city's 21 police districts.

Apparently hoping to renew some of the department's lost lustre, Marlin Johnson, a veteran of 29 years of law enforcement and a former FBI agent in charge of the Chicago office, was elected the new head of the city's police board. The five-member board will oversee the department's rules and regulations, pass on the annual police budget and review serious disciplinary infractions. Conlisk has already given a go-ahead to investigators from the Chicago Human Relations Commission and the Chicago Bar Association, who are now searching through police files for evidence that could support the brutality complaints.

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