“Torture is an open secret in Chicago. Nobody in power wants to acknowledge this grim reality, but everyone knows it happens—and that the torturers are the police.”
That’s the opening of the summary of a new book called “The Torture Letters” written by Princeton University anthropology professor Laurence Ralph. Ralph is a social scientist who studies police violence and race in the United States.
He’s in Rochester as a guest of the University of Rochester, where he’ll give a lecture Wednesday evening. We talk to him about his research, and about police-community relations in American cities. In studio:
- Laurence Ralph, professor of anthropology, and director of the Center on Transnational Policing at Princeton University; and author of “Renegade Dreams: Living Through Injury in Gangland Chicago,” and “The Torture Letters”
