End of the Nightstick.

• Author: Dukmasova, Maya
• Position: Documentary on police violence in Chicago viewed at poetry teach-in

"You don't put a shotgun in a man's mouth and split his upper lip and chip his two teeth unless you've been doing it for a while," Darrell Cannon says to a small group gathered for a teach-in at the Poetry Foundation in downtown Chicago. You don't use the electric cattle prod on a man unless you've been doing it for a while. These things that I just described are things that were done to me."

Next to him, young poets Kristiana Colon, Britteney Black Rose Kapri, and Malcolm London (all three recently published in the groundbreaking anthology The BreakBeat Poets: New American Poetry in the Age of Hip-Hop) sit with downcast eyes. We've just watched a documentary about police violence in Chicago. The grainy footage is more than twenty years old, but the film could have been made yesterday.

The End of the Nightstick memorializes the victims of former Chicago Police commander Jon Burge and chronicles the quest to bring him to justice. Between 1972 and 1991, Burge and detectives under his leadership tortured more than too black men and women, including Cannon. Burge used a hand-cranked generator and other devices to electrocute victims on the ears, fingers, legs, and genitals. To extract confessions, Burge and his men also suffocated suspects with plastic bags, beat them, and staged mock executions.

Prosecutors used the extracted confessions to convict the victims, and, in some cases, send them to death row for murders they did not commit. Cannon spent twenty-four-and-a-half years in prison as a result of the false confession tortured out of him by three detectives in November 1983.

Burge was acquitted of torture charges in 1989, but was eventually fired from his job and found guilty of perjury and obstruction of justice. He served less than four years in prison. He now lives in Florida and continues to receive his police pension. In Chicago, activism in response to his crimes persists. Poets gathered for this teach-in on the eve of the City Council's historic hearing on a reparations ordinance for Burge's victims.

Police brutality did not start or end with Burge, and in communities of color there is a long history of organized protests and creative responses to this phenomenon.

Kapri, Colon, and London join the ranks of Langston Hughes, Audre Lorde, Nikki Giovanni, and many other writers of color who have channeled their painful personal experiences and observations of state-sanctioned violence into poetry and protest.

"Organizing for me is an...