Mayor of Chicago Announces Measures to Curb Use of Deadly Force by the Police by Mitch Smith December 30, 2015 CHICAGO — Under intense pressure to change the behavior of the police force, Mayor Rahm Emanuel on Wednesday announced a series of steps intended to rein in the use of deadly force, promising to buy hundreds of Tasers and to train officers to be less confrontational. […]
An image of mine from Chicago’s Black Friday protests on Michigan Avenue, Chicago’s “Magnificent Mile” and longest shopping street, following the release of a dashcam video of police shooting Laquan McDonald is included in the best news pictures of the year selected by my agency, Corbis Images. You can view the entire gallery on their website.
This was a year of terrorist attacks, mass shootings a-plenty, mass exodus from the Middle East, North and East Africa and the AfPak region which does not include India but a small number from Bangladesh, rising xenophobic far right sentiment, and an uptick in hostility towards Muslims unprecedented since immediately after the September 11, 2001 attacks. The far right so far has been kept on the back burner, but the slow slide into what I liken to the Brezhnev years of the Cold War for the Global War on Terror (GWoT) years is upon us. The American presidential elections offer little reason or occasion for hope. The state of affairs in Syria, too, offers little occasion for hope. “Assad must go” has converted into the new “red line,” as US Secretary of State John Kerry concedes Assad can stay because the US has no one else to pluck out of an abyss of alternatives. The whole world has heard of the Islamic State and the international media relishes any opportunity to put the group’s name …
I was quoted briefly late last week in a Deutsche Welle article, “A rare win for accountability advocates in Chicago,” in connection with my efforts to document the stories and faces of the torture victims of Area 2 and Area 3 from 1973-1991 under former Chicago Police Commander Jon Burge: For the first time in 35 years, a Chicago officer faces a first-degree murder charge for an on-duty fatality. The period includes scores of police killings and 20 dismissed complaints alleging bias, violence and illegal searches by Van Dyke. It also includes many of the years in which Chicago police ran a torture regime in which more than 200 men, the vast majority of them black, were shocked, beaten and subjected to mock executions. In May, the city council agreed to pay out $5.5 million to survivors of the program, many of whom spent years in prison after confessing under duress to crimes they had not committed. The city also continues to pay Commander Jon Burge, who ran the program, a $3,000 monthly pension. “His …
(NOTE: Much of my work from this year remains under embargo until publication including my recent work in Bosnia and Herzegovina with National Geographic Young Explorer Grantee Cara Eckholm.) In February, events in Ukraine rapidly spiraled out of control following the peaceful occupation of the central Maidan Niezalezhnosti or Independence Square in Kiev that had begun late in 2013. On the evening of February 18, 2014, the government of Viktor Yanukovych ordered snipers positioned around the square to fire on demonstrators. The gunfire continued intermittently, killing dozens for two days until it stopped. Then Yanukovych fled to Russia. Since then, Russia has annexed Crimea and sent troops into eastern regions of Ukraine. The government in Kiev has realigned itself with the West and the European Union. In early April, I traveled to Kiev to photograph those who had survived the sniper attacks from February 18-20, 2014 and to hear their stories. I hoped to bring their voice into a conversation about the conflict playing out in the international media and policy circles in Washington and …
The Year in Pictures 2011 The annus horribilis of 2011 is coming to a close – a year that will go down as one of dramatic upheaval and revolution alongside 1789, 1848, 1917, 1989, and now, this year. In Egypt, young revolutionaries overthrew the government of Hosni Mubarak after 31 years of subservience to a one-party state bolstered by an omnipresent muhabarata, or secret service, further bolstered by an overreaching military, after Egyptians witnessed similar events in Tunisia lead to the removal of that country’s former leader Ben Ali. Consequently, the domino theory made a surprise return as events in Egypt triggered revolts elsewhere in Bahrain, Libya, Syria and Yemen. Of these, only Libya’s leader fell after rebels received aerial support from NATO war planes; Qaddafi was found hiding in a drainage canal near his hometown of Sirte (or Surt, depending on your news source and spelling) and subsequently dragged through the streets, sodomized with a knife and otherwise tormented before being shot in the head. In the Libyan conflict three photographers lost their lives, …
Jury Finds Blagojevich Guilty of Corruption By MONICA DAVEY and EMMA G. FITZSIMMONS Published: June 27, 2011 CHICAGO — A jury on Monday convicted Rod R. Blagojevich, the former governor of Illinois, of a broad pattern of corruption, including charges that he tried to personally benefit from his role in selecting a replacement for President Obama in the United States Senate. Mr. Blagojevich, a Democrat who former aides say once envisioned himself as a future presidential contender, was found guilty of most of the 20 federal counts against him: 17 counts of wire fraud, attempted extortion, soliciting bribes, conspiracy to commit extortion and conspiracy to solicit and accept bribes. As the verdicts were read aloud in court, one “guilty” following another, Mr. Blagojevich, who has always proclaimed his innocence, turned, his jaw clenched grimly, to look at his wife, Patti, in the front row. By then, she was already slumped back in the arms of a relative, eyes closed, wiping away tears. The verdict appeared to be the conclusion, at last, to the spectacle of …
This is a pretty special newsletter for me concerning announcements. First, I have graduated from the Georgetown University Graduate School of Foreign Service, which ends a two-year chapter of my life first in Washington, DC and then commuting between there and New York over the past year. While it was a fascinating educational experience, I am ready to move on to new projects and pastures. As a photographer, my work grew as well over those two years, for me most notably last summer when I was a recipient of a National Geographic Young Explorers Grant which facilitated travel photographing the social and economic life along the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan oil pipeline which delivers Caspian crude to the Mediterranean port of Ceyhan by way of Azerbaijan, Georgia and Turkey. Recently, this work was published on the National Geographic website in a photo gallery entitled, “At Five Years, BTC Pipeline Moves Oil, Culture,” with accompanying text by Marianne Lavelle. Lastly, the biggest bit of news. As a consequence of this work and my interest in the people, culture and …
Last week, was a busy one. Rahm Emanuel was inaugurated mayor of Chicago and I graduated from Georgetown University’s Graduate School of Foreign Service. I drove 2,000 miles between here, there and several other places in between. From the corn fields in the plains of the Midwest, to the backyard patios of Brooklyn, to the gates of the highest office in the land. It all ends just before the rapture that was said to end the world but did not manage to. Some postcards from the last week:
In late 2007 and through early 2008, I spent several months following and photographing the Revolutionary Communists, a group based around the personality of Bob Avakian, a reclusive Armenian-American said last to be living in Paris. At the time, they lived at 1230 N. Burling, the last Cabrini Green high-rise building where demolition will begin today. The photo essay, “Plan for Transformation” borrows its title from the name of the urban renewal scheme devised by Mayor Richard M. Daley and the Chicago Housing Authority (CHA) that would see the destruction of some of the largest public housing projects in the nation (at their inception the world) which were built under the leadership and direction of Mayor Richard M. Daley’s father Richard J. Daley during his 21-year tenure as mayor for life. Previously in Fortnight Journal, I wrote in an article entitled “The Chicago Way“: The outcome of the younger Daley’s “Plan for Transformation”–or, more accurately, the demolition of Chicago Housing Authority projects–would hand over large swaths of prime Chicago real estate on the Near North, …
Amanda Rivkin 