Understanding the civil mechanisms of police impunity.
Civil rights attorney Flint Taylor explains how the civil mechanisms around police accountability - from prosecutors and judges, to local and state governments - serve to protect abusive cops from the consequences of their own actions, not only enforcing a long-term culture of impunity and racism, but freezing the community out of negotiation and potential reform.
Flint is representing the family of Derek Williams, who died in the backseat of a Milwaukee police squad car in 2011.
Flint Taylor
As a law student, Flint Taylor was a founding member of the People’s Law Office and has been a partner of the PLO since 1972. As a student and lawyer, he has been dedicated to litigating against police violence and racism for more than fifty-four years. Among the landmark cases that Taylor has litigated are the Fred Hampton Black Panther case; the Greensboro, North Carolina case against the KKK, Nazis and Greensboro police; and a series of cases arising from a pattern and practice of police torture and cover-up by Chicago police Commander Jon Burge, former Cook County State’s Attorney and Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley, and numerous other law enforcement officials. He has represented, and continues to represent, many wrongfully convicted persons, including police torture victims who have spent decades in prison and on death row. He has chronicled his work and that of the People’s Law Office in an award-winning historical memoir titled The Torture Machine.
Fighting the torture machine: On the past and present of Chicago police violence.
Remembering the assassination of Fred Hampton, and the threat to Black liberation today.
