It Could Happen Here - Rekia Boyd and the Chicago Police Department's International Reign of Terror, Part 1

Episode Date: March 3, 2022

Mia Wong sits down with Raven, a Chicago journalist, to discuss the cops' murder of Rekia Boyd and how the cop who murdered her trained death squads.   Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

You should probably keep your lights on for Nocturnal Tales from the Shadowbride. Join me, Danny Trejo, and step into the flames of fright. An anthology podcast of modern-day horror stories inspired by the most terrifying legends and lore of Latin America. Listen to Nocturnal on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to It Could Happen Here, a podcast that is, you know, this is a podcast about the world falling apart. The world is, in fact, falling apart extremely quickly right now. And I'm your host, Christopher.

And I am here today to talk about an immense occupying army with an extensive record of torture and extrajudicial killings. I am referring, of course, to the Chicago Police Department. And with me to talk about yet more just absolute horrors that this department has committed here and worldwide. I have Raven, who is a journalist from Chicago Free Media. Raven, welcome to the show and thank you for joining us. Hi, thank you for having me. Yeah, how have you been holding up in these, oh boy, things are going bad times yeah you know we uh we had discussed doing this interview earlier this week and i don't think either of us expected uh russia to invade ukraine last night yep that was it yeah and that wasn't even the yeah it was it was the convoy. This is a time of chaos and death.

But I think it's important to understand that it has always been a time of chaos and death. Right. Yeah, and I think especially where the Chicago Police Department is concerned. We've talked about... We've talked about some of their more famous crimes on the show but i wanted to have raven on to talk about uh a police killing that i don't think got that much attention i mean even it got a lot of attention in chicago but even inside of chicago i don't think it's as well

known as some of the other police killings and And that's the killing of Rekia Boyd. Yeah. Raven, do you want to walk us through how, basically what, what happened the night that Dante Servin killed Rekia Boyd? And yeah, we can start from there.

Sure. Sure. I mean, and yeah we can start from there sure sure i mean there's some context here for sure about sort of the the way we ignore the murders of black women specifically yeah um and you know rakia boyd was was murdered after sort of like the first wave of of national black lives matter protests so it wasn't like it wasn't on the radar, right, that people weren't talking about police killing Black people. But there is this longstanding issue, of course, with the killings of Black women specifically

not getting as much attention, right? And this was just such a horrible, horrible incident that, I mean, looking at the details, even, even though I live here and I was like around when it happened and some of our other, you know, the other journalists in our collective covered the protests and, and, and the, the court drama and everything, it still just blows my mind, um, the way this happened. And, um, you know, ultimately the most important thing to take away from it is that her family never saw justice. He walked away. He walked away from the incident and then went on to start training police in Latin America, which we can talk about also. also yeah so so not only did this did the chicago police officer who was off duty with an unregistered gun murder an innocent 22 year old black woman hang out with her friends in a park

he then got a job with like a tactical training institute to travel to honduras and train police there yeah and i think yeah we can i think we yeah we definitely will be getting to the sort of international right angle of this but yeah yeah the export of american policing essentially yeah but i guess for people who aren't familiar with what happened um can we walk through that yeah so so servin showed up um at a park with an unregistered gun um he you know witnesses reported that he smelled like alcohol that night he may have been drinking i don't know that that was ever verified but certainly wouldn't be surprising um showed up at this park to complain about a group of people making noise. And one of Rukia Boyd's friends approached the car with his cell phone in his hand,

which Servin then would go on to say thought was a gun, and started firing shots and shot Rukia Boyd in the head. He wasn't on duty. He wasn't on duty. He wasn't actively policing. This was totally, totally outside of the realm of duty incident, right? Yeah. And no weapon was ever recovered from the scene. Nothing like that.

I mean, it was, there was no no in no universe was there any justification for this right yeah it just defy it defies logic like that that it could even happen this way um and after it happened you know so not only did he kill rikia boyd in this park um but after it happened there was there was just a lot of missteps in the justice system. And it had been, I think, I want to say like 17 years at that point since a Chicago cop

had actually been charged with murder, right? So it had been a long time since there had been even any accountability. And basically, the prosecutor, there was something called a directed verdict where the prosecutor essentially undercharged him intentionally, or we think it was intentionally, um, with, with like reckless conduct and manslaughter and the judge tossed case because the judge was saying, you know, it didn't even meet the criteria for, for reckless conduct because it was clearly first degree murder. And then he couldn't be

tried again because of rules surrounding double jeopardy, is like just a like it's just like what like it's it's such like i was reading this it's baffling like it's like the the this whole thing is like it's it's very like very very seems very clearly set up to fail it's like yeah like we're gonna we're gonna intentionally have a case where we try this guy with things that you that you just you cannot convict him of because like again it's it's not it's not like manslaughter he just he he drove up and shot her like right he he very like very clearly with intention shot ricky avoid and it very much seems like they planned this out that they were like into the and you know this is we've talked about this on the last CPD episode.

Like, prosecutors collaborate with judges and the police constantly because that's just how the thing called the justice system works. But, like, yeah, this is like a precariously egregious example of them just setting up a case that they know that they just knew would fail exactly and this is the same prosecutor who was ousted in the aftermath of the uh the laquan mcdonald murder um you know there were there were very large protests then there was a hashtag going on social media her name's anita alvarez so the hashtag was by anita yeah and the thing was anita alvarez like i think people outside the city probably

didn't don't know about much about this but like this anita alvarez was like so hated that like like every like like everyone in the city basically worked together to run her out. Like, you had, like, you had, like, liberals and anarchist groups, like, working together. Like, everyone in the city, like, the electoralists, the anti-electoralists, like, the people who just, like,

have no politics, basically, whatsoever. Like, it was this really incredible, like, coalition because she like just the stuff anita alvarez is doing is just so egregious that everyone was able to find a way to put aside their differences on just the logic of get her out right right but you know to note again that was in the aftermath of the laquan mcdonald's shooting and you know it wasn't it didn't what happened with rickia boyd wasn't enough to for those large protests and and this is not to like denigrate or demean the people who did come out in protests

because it's still like like there were still protests don't get me wrong like people showed up for rakia but the difference in people showing up for rakia and people showing up for black men being shot you know like that that's something that black women have drawn attention to you know they're like why don't you care when we get murdered um and it's just it's become this sort of um you know ongoing chant like if you go to any chicago racial justice protest you will hear people say we do this for laquan we do this for rikia because it's just one of those names that for whatever reason based on what was going on in the media at the time just like didn't make its way outside of Chicago very much. Yeah.

Um, and, and we're seeing a similar sort of situation right now with what happened with Amir Locke in Minneapolis, right? Like that was something where I think a lot of us thought, okay, wow,

this, this is going to, this is going to explode. You know, this is such just a horrible miscarriage of justice. Like, how could this happen? Surely there will be massive protests again, you know, something like that. And of course, you know, Minneapolis was out there.

We had like some small actions here in Chicago, but didn't really catch fire, so to say. catch fire, so to say. Welcome. I'm Danny Thrill. Won't you join me at the fire and dare enter Nocturnum, Tales from the Shadows, presented by iHeart and Sonora.

An anthology of modern day horror stories inspired by the legends of Latin America. From ghastly encounters with shapeshifters to bone-chilling brushes with supernatural creatures. I know you. Take a trip and experience the horrors that have haunted Latin America since the beginning of time. Listen to Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows as part of My Cultura podcast network. Available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

I mean, I think that there's always sort of cycles of this, where, you know, there's cycles where you get these massive protesting cycles, you don't, but you know, and I think this is one of the things that you can look at with Rekia Boy too, where it's, like, regardless of whether people are in the streets or not, the killing continues. Right.

that that's just what the police is right and until you know and until they are actually stopped you're just going to keep getting this cycle of i don't even know if select like selective outrage is the right word but you get these cycles of people who get murdered and there's protests and people who get murdered and get forgotten and yeah yeah yeah and and it it really does seem to be kind of you know there's a lot of layers to it like like obviously the the misogyny against black women is part of it and i think the media just you know is is a part of it too like i mean i'm a part of the media in a sense but we're alternative, so it's a little bit different. But, you know, like there are choices made behind closed doors about what stories to follow and amplify. Because of what happened in 2020, I think there's a lot more scrutiny on Chicago police now, at least more mainstream scrutiny of them than there was back in 2012 when Rekia was murdered.

Yeah. And that's not to say that we're doing enough because we absolutely are not. But I think 2020 did in some way, you know, push things just like a little bit further, if that makes sense. You know, there are some more liberal mainstream types of people talking about the horrors of Chicago policing and and all of that. But, you know, when it comes to Chicago police, like I just their apparatus is so so massive like not just from like the funding they get but like their media and pr you know the the prosecutors and the judges like you mentioned are absolutely part of the policing apparatus like they're not separate right it's prosecutors are cops and we have a prosecutor for a mayor and she is a cop like and and you know it was black youth who tried so hard to speak up about this before she was elected and and said like lori

light but is a cop and people didn't listen to them and that's where we're at now where we have this this prosecutor for a mayor who's because of her background like she can only view things through a punitive lens like her answer to everything is just punishment how can we how can we punish people yeah like one of the things she was trying to do recently was she wanted to do these like basically this measure where they they called it like an anti-gang funding thing but it was basically just like if there's a group of people you can just take the cops can just take money from them

and it was like it was this incredible thing like it was you know part of what's going on here is that I've talked about this before but like Lori Lightfoot is you know at the time I think people voted for her partially because they just didn't listen. And the Northsiders were just like, oh, hey, look, it's Lori Lightfoot.

But then, you know, like part of it was she ran as like the anti-machine candidate. And it was like, no, she's just a cop. But like what I think is interesting is, you know, like she she's like incredibly's incredibly widely hated to the point where the Chicago City Council is not notably an anti-police body, but even the City Council was like, you can't do this.

They actually blocked, I think, if I'm getting my facts right on this, I'm pretty sure they blocked Life With Reposal because it was just like They did, yeah. And that's been one of the things that we've had a couple of

weird kind of attempts to rein the CPD in, but they're not really happening because of anti-police sentiment. They're basically happening because the city council's feuding with the mayor right which is right weird yeah and and you know i've seen it like i it's it's she's such an god i could the the figure of mayor laurie laurie lifeboat i mean it just makes no sense right because she's hated by people on the left

you know who obviously are anti-policing she's also hated by the police yeah the police hater I mean it's incredible like she she does like yeah she I mean if you go through any of the conservative like cop blogs and and twitter, you know, Chicago police are very active on social media, right. Which is, you know, it's whole, a whole thing in and of itself because these people, you know, they shouldn't be broadcasting the things on social media that they do, but she's universally hated by everyone at this point. So, you know, it's just been a really it's been a really tough couple years for chicago since the riots especially because chicago just the word has become so loaded in the national

media right like it's become this this this racist boogeyman essentially for like what what could happen to your city if if the woke mobs successfully defund the police or you know whatever which is completely at odds with reality because at no point have we defunded the police like their budget just keeps increasing yeah like what what's what's their budget it's like is it... I want to say it's 40% of the total budget, but I think that's low. It's something like that. I mean, it's billions of dollars. Yeah.

We're pumping billions of dollars into this standing army that is basically occupying... 40% of Chicago's budget goes to the police department. Right. Right. 40 40 of chicago's budget is it goes to the police department right right and you know all of that money could obviously be spent on other things and and we know like we know what reduces crime i mean obviously we could get into like the category of what even is a crime, right? Like there are certainly lots of things that shouldn't be labeled crimes that are, but we know that communities with resources don't have significant violent crime problems.

Like we know that lifting people out of poverty and giving them opportunities and homes and all of these things, like we know that that reduces interpersonal harm. And instead, we just keep looking at everything through this lens of punishment. Yeah. And how punitive we can be. Yeah. Yeah. And it's been, i don't know i

the chicago police department is just it's just an absolute horror show um and it's a horror show and and they're also like it's a horror show not just because of how evil they are but also because they're incompetent right yeah like you've got them doing all of these really bad things and then they also just like struggle to to cover up their crime and they're just they're messing up like along the way at every step yeah and it's i don't know they they have the cpds like it's they have this kind of, you know, I mean, I don't know. I don't know how exactly unique it is, but I think going back to our sort of theory of like every police department has one thing that they're really good at. It's the CPD has this unique combination of like incompetence, torture and crime that they do.

That's like, I think so. I think sets it apart from a lot of other police departments. Yeah. Welcome. I'm Danny Thrill. Won't you join me at the fire and dare enter. Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows presented by iHeart and Sonora. An anthology of modern-day horror stories inspired by the legends of Latin America.

From ghastly encounters with shapeshifters to bone-chilling brushes with supernatural creatures. I know you. Take a trip and experience the horrors that have haunted Latin America since the beginning of time. Listen to Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows as part of My Cultura podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

I think that's a good place to sort of jump off into the second, I guess, part of the Rekia Boyd story. Or really, it seems to be the Rekia Boyd story. It's the story of Dante Servin, which is his role in essentially exporting American policing and the horrors of the American police system and the horrors of American imperialism to other countries, because it is not enough that the CPD murders people here. They've also not mentioned in it, but it was a really good story. I recommend people look it up because, you know, some of this

research is not, like, my original research, right? It stems from the research that people with the Invisible Institute did, but essentially, you know, there are Chicago police officers, and there's one in particular. His name is Aaron Cunningham.

He's the man who um founded this tactical training institute um that go you know they go abroad like they go to different countries and and it's private privately funded though they claim to be working with with the feds and there's a lot of like weird gray area there where there's not a lot of oversight and nobody really knows like are you getting federal money to do this are you just saying you are like like what's the deal right but but cunningham was essentially like a crooked cop who funded this tactical training institute so that they go overseas to under-resourced countries with under-resourced police departments and train them in how to be police. They train them in

crowd control. They train them in narcotics and drug investigations. They train them in gang warfare, all of these things right and these are countries that have tremendous issues with like you know outright warfare going on between gangs and the existing police forces right so they're in desperate need of of aid of assistance and and of course like some of these conflicts that are going on stem from american imperialism to begin with right so it's like we cause the problems then we're gonna come in and like send a bunch of cops over who like you know have extensive misconduct records in their in their home cities and some of them have even just like murdered innocent women in the park yeah and we're gonna have them train your guys into how to be cops yeah and

and yeah you know that that goes about as well as you would expect it to which is one of the things that the reader piece talks about is so one of the they these guys get brought in to train a bunch of cops in el salvador after the el salvadorian police do a bunch of horrible massacres and then they train these cops and then the cops immediately turn around and also again do a bunch of horrible massacres and yeah it's it's this it's this you know i mean i i i i i don't want to de-emphasize the fact that like the like el salvador for example like is a place that has its own like native right wing like it has like it has its own el salvador like right wing death squads right and they they've you know back by the cia

but like yeah and i i i don't want to like under my, like underplay just how violent, just like the local reactionaries are because it's, it's not, it's like, it's, it's, it's not like they, they wouldn't also be death squads if the U S wasn't there,

but like the U S you know, and, and the Chicago police department sending people to train them is making them even worse. And it's. Yeah. Yeah. sending people to train them is making them even worse and it's yeah yeah and and every place has their own right-wing reactionaries right like we're seeing right now to bring to loop everything together and just bring us back to like what's going on with ukraine and russia um it's related you know like both sides of this conflict have their own reactionary right-wing forces, right?

Yeah. And anywhere you go around the world, that's going to be a thing. And empires like the American Empire or the Russian Empire or the El Salvador Empire, whatever empire, they're going to be looking for ways to take advantage of those forces to achieve their own ends. What I think is important, one of the things I think is important about this politically is to understand that there is an incredible amount of international solidarity between cops. They have... a like there there is an incredible amount of international solidarity between cops right they have yeah you know like that you know i've seen i think there's a book called the thin blue line international but it's yeah i mean that that's that's a thing like you see this basically

everywhere the cops like the the cops know which side they're on and it's the side of the other cops and i think that's something that that confuses a lot of people because you get things like like for example like like the chinese police right like the chinese police like go like we're trained by i think i mean well you know okay so the the like the chinese police in hong kong for example like that that police force like is still literally just a colonial british police force they just they didn't even like they didn't even bring in new people they just like promoted a new person who was a british colonial police officer and then made them the new head of the police and then you know and those those and those cops are also

trained by the term by american cops are trained by british cops uh they're trained a lot by israeli cops um this is this this is the same thing you know it's the same thing with with with with the like the the you know like this this is the sort of the same effect that gets you like eric prince like you know being being like hired by the ccp to run stuff and change on like it's it's there's there's an incredible right wing sort of militarist cop alliance that go just you know it's it's it's it's it's it's a kind of international police solidarity that scrambles a lot of the sort of perceptions of what people think like like what what how people try to think about the world because right yeah and you know and like it like fundamentally like the the the the basis they have is the defensive property and the defense of sort of the the the like the the the

i usually call it like the the the global white supremacist regime and they all know you know when when an american cop goes to el salvador like they they know which side they're on. They're on the cop's side. And they share information, they share weapons, they share tactics, they share literally people. They share training. And of course, because again,

it's the CPD, they share Dante Servin. Yeah. And so he, you know, apparently at some point, very shortly after the murder of Rekia Boyd, it looks like, based on what I've seen on his social media and what I've pieced together from his employment history, it looks like he had begun working with one of these tactical training institutes right before the murder.

And then he murdered Rekia Boyd. And I mean, I guess technically I'm not supposed to use the word murder, but you know, yeah, no, fuck him. He murdered Rekia Boyd.

And so, so he murdered Rekia Boyd and then everything happened with like the going through court and he walked away without being charged or imprisoned. I mean, he was charged, but without being convicted or imprisoned. Then the police board, you know, recommended his firing, but he resigned two days before, like he was supposed to have his hearing. So he still gets a pension. I'm pretty sure that's how that works. Yeah.

And so he gets, yeah, I don't, I'd have to confirm that, but I'm pretty sure he gets the pension. So he resigns. And then at some point after he resigns, he starts posting to social media about his trips to Honduras and, you know, is posting photos of like hanging out in the bar with, with

the cops down there and, and kind of just all of that. And this is all like public information like it's he has like a linkedin page where he's like the things he's been doing like like this is completely public i don't know like why nobody knows about it or has talked about it um but you know that also i think just comes back to this murder kind of flying under the national radar a lot um and so you know we don't know what company or organization he's there with um it doesn't say he's with international tactical training association which is the the Chicago-based group led by Aaron Cunningham and his wife my guess would be it's that

group because that's the big one out of space out of chicago but you know like we can't i can't prove it yeah it could be another it could be another right-wing tactical training group that's training death squads now yeah and that's the thing right is that this is not just happening here in chicago so like there are these tactical training groups all over and there are a number of u.s based ones started by different police officers from different departments because it's kind of like a career path for them in a sense because it's a thing they can do once they retire you get and it's a money maker you hold these these tactical training seminars and so a number of them are domestically based right

like they're not necessarily going overseas but what they're doing is they're they're having these seminars and they're training other police officers in like certain things like some of them might be like an afternoon session where you go and you learn about like you know firearm safety or something then there might be like larger ones where you go and you like stay and camp out for like three days and you practice like ambushing guerrilla gangs in the jungle or something like that. And then a lot of them are based around gun safety and firearms training. And some of those are open to the general public.

It depends. Some of these are, like, only for other cops or law enforcement. And you have to, like, show ID or military. And you have to, like, prove that you're affiliated with police or military. Some of them are open to the public and you just have to have like a firearms cart. Oh, boy. So that's problematic. Yep.

For one reason, because we found out in the aftermath of the January 6th Capitol riot that a number of a number of the Capitol rioters did attend like firearms training classes tactical training classes in just various sort of locations yep so this is a way for officers who have left the force for whatever reason to then have a captive audience and yeah they're teaching them how to like shoot guns and you know follow the more like specific sort of things like that but what kind of conversations are they having? Like, what kind of ideology is being espoused? What kind of other people are showing up to these meetings? And what are they talking about? What groups are they recruiting for? What are their

affiliations? Yeah, and I think that's something that's important to think about and also to have more generations of journalists look into because when you look at these – I mean we've had stories like this before, right? I mean this is a lot of how – for example, the Taiwanese Special Forces, for example, spent an enormous amount of – well, partially Special Forces, partially just the Taiwanese army – spent an enormous amount of time doing stuff very similar to this. And the product of that was – this is the Cold War era. They're doing this in the 70s. They're doing this in the 80s, some extent in the 60s. um you know and and i mean the product of this is like arena the product of this is you know the the like the like one of the people they trained did the el mazote massacre like and that that kind of stuff you can trace these these influence networks and you can trace these sort of so i mean a lot of this is i mean literally just funded by weird cults. But you can trace these different sort of paramilitary intelligence networks.

And what you see at the end of them is a lot of the time it's just a bunch of fascists. And it's a bunch of fascists doing coups. And in some sense, yeah, this is a kind of like – liberal democracy has this sort of problem right which is that in order for liberal democracy to you know function as a liberal democracy you have to have cops and that means that you're you know you you are producing domestically and internationally a group of just ferocious bloodthirsty right-wing murderers and you're giving them state authority you're giving them all these training and weapons and you know the the product of that is they they do what

they're trying to do which is they kill people they torture people they train other people how to do this and yeah you you get these these cascading series of effects that lead you know a bunch of people taking these classes january 6th they lead them to coups all over the world they lead them to death squads all over the world. This has been It Could Happen Here. Join us tomorrow for part two of our interview with Raven. You can find us at Instagram and on Twitter at HappenHerePod. Check out The Cool Zone for more of our podcast, and thank you for listening. It Could Happen Here is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

You can find sources for It Could Happen Here updated monthly at coolzonemedia.com. Thanks for listening. You should probably keep your lights on for Nocturnal Tales from the Shadow. Join me, Danny Trejo, and step into the flames of right. An anthology podcast of modern day horror stories inspired by the most terrifying legends and lore of Latin America. Listen to Nocturnal on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.