11 ms·

“I Was Tortured in the Pasadena Jailhouse” by Bobby Fischer (1982)

michael1999 4y ago
This sounds like the sort of routine police violence that happens every day in the USA. There's nothing there to suggest they had any idea who he was.
- ROTMetro 4y ago
  Yeah. Oh isolation for a few days? Look what the prison system did during COVID, suspending all rights rules and any pretense of inmates being humans because COVID safety trumped all. Try living in a space the size of an elevator with 2 people, a bunk bed, a desk, a chair, and a trash can, lockers, and a 18 inch window (the looks out onto gravel and razor wire) for a year. No fresh air, no being let outside. Like 36X24 inches of clear ground space. For exercise we filled trash bags with water as makeshift weights. Guards popped the bags if they saw them. Phone calls severely restricted ('phones are a vector for spread') while your mother is dying of cancer alone. If you came down with COVID, strict isolation with NONE of the constitutional rights protections applied (because COVID superseded). Showers only once a week at 3 am. Oh yeah, and if you officially get COVID, everyone else near you locked down in isolation too. Guess what? No one reported they were sick because if they got everyone put in indefinite isolation they were FUCKED and getting beat down when everyone got let out of isolation. And they definitely didn't make that rule to keep people from reporting, thereby keeping their 'reported' numbers looking good. American cruelty is the worst kind. No access to the courts (law library closed and you not allowed out of your cell).
jollyllama 4y ago
Wow. Don't talk to police.
- giraffe_lady 4y ago
  These words aren't a magic spell, they can still beat the shit out of you and arrest you if they want. Maybe let's try "don't have police" instead. Why do we spend such incredible resources on a military force that hates us, that we must fear?
  - NikolaNovak 4y ago
    I'll bite & engage. I feel like "don't have police" is not feasible, in fact a complete non-starter outside of "nuclear family" sized units, unless we get into semantics. In a large society, there are likely to be some basic, ideally mutually agreed rules (unless we are advocating for a true dystopian anarchy). There will likely be some way of monitoring and enforcing those rules - whether it be as basic as "don't shoot children in the face with a shotgun" or "don't defecate on other people's food" et cetera, or something more elaborate and granular. We can call that organization "police" or "friendly helpful neighbourhood helpers" or "Gnorf" or whatever; We can and should have meaningful discussion and change on what the mutually agreed upon rules are, how we enforce them, what the balances, checks, authority, etc are, scope and mandate, training and oversight, absolutely; but I do not believe "don't have police" as an absolute statement is a valid proposition with thought-through consequences, and I don't believe it's helpful to any side of the issue in moving forward to make life a better place. That being said, maybe I'm wrong, and I'd be interested in what your elaborated proposal might look like?
    - wollsmoth 4y ago
      It's a complete fantasy from someone who is lucky to have never needed to call the Police. Unfortunately someone's gotta take out the trash. The real problem is we need police to be accountable, but that's easier than it sounds, apparently.
      - giraffe_lady 4y ago
        The police certainly serve their purpose well for those comfortable calling other people trash, yes. My assertion isn't that they're ineffective at their purpose, but that their purpose is not one worth serving. We almost certainly disagree on this, but you should not be making any assumptions about what my relationships to the police are or have been.
        NikolaNovak 4y ago
        Interesting. 1. I took a much more charitable interpretation of their post - "Somebody has to take out the trash" to mean somebody has to be the janitor / garbage disposal expert, even though it's not traditionally a desired or easy position. And therefore in the context of this discussion, to mean "Somebody (Police, or whatever we call them) has to respond to crime and danger". 2. When you say "their purpose is not one worth serving", I don't think we merely disagree; I am honestly having a hard time fathoming the framework/thought/life perspective/point/literally anything. The purpose of police is to "serve & protect". We can agree or disagree how well they do at that; what the margins and scope and mandate and methods and oversight etc etc etc are; but if you believe protecting the weak from the strong, preventing crime is purpose not worth serving, we may have an axiomatic difference so massive we may not be able to meaningfully proceed in discussion. (and fwiw, I've lived in Canada & USA, as well as in what some might consider police state; I've been poor and well off; I've been on the privileged and on the harassed side of class/ethnicity/nationality/religion/group; me and mine have had our share of being harassed by various police in some places, and I also had friends who are police officers in other places; but I still cannot envision a societal framework anarchic enough to say that civil protection, which is the purpose if not the implementation, is not worth serving in principle)
- whiddershins 4y ago
  That was decades ago.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
dredmorbius 4y ago
There's some context for this in an Atlantic article on Fischer: <https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2002/12/bobby-fischer-s-pathetic-endgame/302634/ https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2002/12/bobby-f...>
kwertyoowiyop 4y ago
At that time I wouldn’t have believed this was all true, but I do now.
neaden 4y ago
I think it's important to note that Bobby Fischer was paranoid and delusional. While he was definitely arrested and injured, his exact claims here should be viewed sceptically.
- Varyag 4y ago
  Man, if I went through all that I would be paranoid as well.
  - neaden 4y ago
    His paranoia started before this. Edit: I want to be clear here, the police can absolutely be abusive to paranoid people, and people struggling with mental illness might seem to be acting suspiciously or weirdly by the police who have no training in dealing with mental health. It's very possible Bobby was acting oddly though non criminaly and the police totally mishandled it, he certainly shouldn't have been arrested. But his exact claims of what happened need to be viewed with the knowledge he frequently made false accusations throughout his life.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    - lostlogin 4y ago
      > the police who have no training in dealing with mental health. This in itself is a conscious choice. Someone had chosen not to train the officers.
- toast0 4y ago
  If you ignore the assumptions he made about the motives about the other participants in his story, most of it is pretty well within the shape of expected behavior. Person is stopped on the street because of looking like suspect. On closer look, doesn't actually look like suspect but acts oddly and invites police to arrest him. They arrest him, and are not gentle with the handcuffs or putting him into the car. The actual suspect is caught elsewhere, but Bobby is arrested on suspicion of acting oddly, not of being the bank robber, so no reason to let him go. The part about choking him during interrogation, I dunno, anyway they interrogated him and were unsatisfied. Placed naked into empty cell with the light on seems like normal procedure (whether that's right or wrong) for someone arrested for behaving oddly; then being transferred to solitary doesn't seem out of the norm either. That they were considering sending him to a mental hospital and concerned about suicide is consistent with that treatment. Bobby offers that he was doing a lot of screaming and what not during this time. Eventually, someone in charge takes a look in and asks direct questions and Bobby gets his clothes back and his phone call and released. This isn't treatment I'd like to have, and I'd like for it not to be normal, but unfortunately, it's pretty much normal, so I don't think there's a whole lot to be skeptical about --- with the exception of the choking. That could have happened, or it might not have, I don't know if that was really normal or not; I think a lot of interrogations are now video recorded for many reasons, but probably not in 1981
marcodiego 4y ago
I wonder how credible this could be considering that Bobby Fischer eventually turned into a conspiracist and and international shame to the US. A bright mind that had its ghosts.
- moss2 4y ago
  That's a self-fulfilling prophecy. If I was subjected to torture by a judicial institution for no reason what-so-ever, I would also be traumatized by the events and turn into a conspiracy theorist.
  - neaden 4y ago
    He wanted the millitary to take over and execute all the Jewish people in the country, whom he blamed for all his problems. Many people are treated poorly by the police and don't start advocating genocide.
    - HideousKojima 4y ago
      A lot of Bobby Fischer's quotes about Jews are almost kind of funny in a horrifying/ironic way when you realize he was a Jew himself spouting stuff that would fit perfectly at a skinhead rally.
      - neaden 4y ago
        Well he denied being a Jew, though his mother was he said he never was raised Jewish in any way. So while he met the Jewish definition of being Jewish it's not a label he would ever use for himself.
        whateveracct 4y ago
        Usually when people talk about genocide of Jews, they don't care if they're practicing or were raised that way.
bongoman37 4y ago
While a lot of people are looking at the claims in the article with skepticism, the claims are actually pretty run of the mill. US police does do these kind of things and worse fairly routinely, anybody who knows cops will find that they joke about it fairly often and anybody who knows people who have had run-ins with the cop will attest that this is pretty plausible. A cop friend I had told me with a straight face that there are no innocent men in jails. His reasoning was that there are lots of things that you are guilty of but never charged with like think of all the times you got away with speeding. So even if a particular man is innocent of the crime he is jail for, it doesn't matter because there are things that he should be in jail for but isn't. Ergo, no innocent people in jails.
- the_optimist 4y ago
  People who aren’t cops also harbor plenty of unusual conceptions of justice, which is why we have attempted to formalize and codify essential aspects of justice in the law. The cops are supposed to be informed of, enforce, and of course abide by the law. Lawfare now featuring prominently in the US suggests that in practice we have now reached far higher levels of abstract guile and malfeasance than what is indicated here.
nanna 4y ago
Reading this it's hard to not agree with Huey P Newton's assesment of the police as 'brutal, gross and uncairing', or 'pigs', especially when such behaviour systematically characterised(/s) their interaction with blacks.
- mistrial9 4y ago
  Huey Newton himself was an explicit racist, ghetto thug, bully and thief .. attracting exactly the kind of stupid enforcement that typically deals with that kind of thing, every day for years. Neither side is innocent.. far from it..
  - wutangson1 4y ago
    Lol. Was Bobby Seale a ‘ghetto thug’, a ‘bully’, & a ‘thief’? Was Fred Hampton all the above as well? If Fred Hampton was, then why not just proudly say who in government ordered for him to be assassinated in his sleep?
    - mistrial9 4y ago
      no I did not say that .. and Huey Newton is complicated by social interactions and media attention over time which changed the man and changed his social surroundings. There is a knee-jerk crowd that rose to his defense at the time, as it is happening now in these comments. "revolutionary" was not a coincidental term. Gun violence is practiced daily in Oakland, California.
      - wutangson1 4y ago
        I agree. The actual man, the celebrity from media, and the pressure from domestic intelligence agencies would effect anyone. But, just as there is nuance in understanding Huey P. Newton, surely there is the same nuance for people for whom his message resonated with- beyond being merely 'knee jerk'. Regular gun violence in Oakland does not make everyone in Oakland a bad person, or a criminal or an accessory to criminal behavior
pliptvo 4y ago
All the ad hominem attacks on Bobby Fisher in this thread are by the by. One can accept that he was paranoid, conspiratorial and antisemitic -- which I do -- whilst also accepting that he was subjected to the police violence he describes in this account. Many people with mental health issues are subjected to violence, by police or otherwise; to refuse to believe them merely on account of their mental health is itself a function of the violence which puts them in harms way in the first place.
hydrok9 4y ago
In more recent news: https://abc13.com/pasadena-police-accused-brutality-cavazos-family/11824334/ https://abc13.com/pasadena-police-accused-brutality-cavazos-...
- PraetorianGourd 4y ago
  Different Pasadena. Yeah the cops can be cunts but that doesn’t justify lazy link-baiting.
webdoodle 4y ago
I always find it interesting that after his disappearance, he ended up being found living in Japan, with a fellow chess master friend. Even after all that time, the U.S. still attempted to prosecute him.
stefantalpalaru 4y ago

michael1999 4y ago

This sounds like the sort of routine police violence that happens every day in the USA. There's nothing there to suggest they had any idea who he was.

ROTMetro 4y ago
Yeah. Oh isolation for a few days? Look what the prison system did during COVID, suspending all rights rules and any pretense of inmates being humans because COVID safety trumped all. Try living in a space the size of an elevator with 2 people, a bunk bed, a desk, a chair, and a trash can, lockers, and a 18 inch window (the looks out onto gravel and razor wire) for a year. No fresh air, no being let outside. Like 36X24 inches of clear ground space. For exercise we filled trash bags with water as makeshift weights. Guards popped the bags if they saw them. Phone calls severely restricted ('phones are a vector for spread') while your mother is dying of cancer alone. If you came down with COVID, strict isolation with NONE of the constitutional rights protections applied (because COVID superseded). Showers only once a week at 3 am. Oh yeah, and if you officially get COVID, everyone else near you locked down in isolation too. Guess what? No one reported they were sick because if they got everyone put in indefinite isolation they were FUCKED and getting beat down when everyone got let out of isolation. And they definitely didn't make that rule to keep people from reporting, thereby keeping their 'reported' numbers looking good. American cruelty is the worst kind. No access to the courts (law library closed and you not allowed out of your cell).

jollyllama 4y ago

Wow. Don't talk to police.

giraffe_lady 4y ago
These words aren't a magic spell, they can still beat the shit out of you and arrest you if they want. Maybe let's try "don't have police" instead. Why do we spend such incredible resources on a military force that hates us, that we must fear?
- NikolaNovak 4y ago
  I'll bite & engage. I feel like "don't have police" is not feasible, in fact a complete non-starter outside of "nuclear family" sized units, unless we get into semantics. In a large society, there are likely to be some basic, ideally mutually agreed rules (unless we are advocating for a true dystopian anarchy). There will likely be some way of monitoring and enforcing those rules - whether it be as basic as "don't shoot children in the face with a shotgun" or "don't defecate on other people's food" et cetera, or something more elaborate and granular. We can call that organization "police" or "friendly helpful neighbourhood helpers" or "Gnorf" or whatever; We can and should have meaningful discussion and change on what the mutually agreed upon rules are, how we enforce them, what the balances, checks, authority, etc are, scope and mandate, training and oversight, absolutely; but I do not believe "don't have police" as an absolute statement is a valid proposition with thought-through consequences, and I don't believe it's helpful to any side of the issue in moving forward to make life a better place. That being said, maybe I'm wrong, and I'd be interested in what your elaborated proposal might look like?
  - wollsmoth 4y ago
    It's a complete fantasy from someone who is lucky to have never needed to call the Police. Unfortunately someone's gotta take out the trash. The real problem is we need police to be accountable, but that's easier than it sounds, apparently.
    - giraffe_lady 4y ago
      The police certainly serve their purpose well for those comfortable calling other people trash, yes. My assertion isn't that they're ineffective at their purpose, but that their purpose is not one worth serving. We almost certainly disagree on this, but you should not be making any assumptions about what my relationships to the police are or have been.
      - NikolaNovak 4y ago
        Interesting. 1. I took a much more charitable interpretation of their post - "Somebody has to take out the trash" to mean somebody has to be the janitor / garbage disposal expert, even though it's not traditionally a desired or easy position. And therefore in the context of this discussion, to mean "Somebody (Police, or whatever we call them) has to respond to crime and danger". 2. When you say "their purpose is not one worth serving", I don't think we merely disagree; I am honestly having a hard time fathoming the framework/thought/life perspective/point/literally anything. The purpose of police is to "serve & protect". We can agree or disagree how well they do at that; what the margins and scope and mandate and methods and oversight etc etc etc are; but if you believe protecting the weak from the strong, preventing crime is purpose not worth serving, we may have an axiomatic difference so massive we may not be able to meaningfully proceed in discussion. (and fwiw, I've lived in Canada & USA, as well as in what some might consider police state; I've been poor and well off; I've been on the privileged and on the harassed side of class/ethnicity/nationality/religion/group; me and mine have had our share of being harassed by various police in some places, and I also had friends who are police officers in other places; but I still cannot envision a societal framework anarchic enough to say that civil protection, which is the purpose if not the implementation, is not worth serving in principle)
whiddershins 4y ago
That was decades ago.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

dredmorbius 4y ago

There's some context for this in an Atlantic article on Fischer: <https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2002/12/bobby-fischer-s-pathetic-endgame/302634/ https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2002/12/bobby-f...>

kwertyoowiyop 4y ago

At that time I wouldn’t have believed this was all true, but I do now.

neaden 4y ago

I think it's important to note that Bobby Fischer was paranoid and delusional. While he was definitely arrested and injured, his exact claims here should be viewed sceptically.

Varyag 4y ago
Man, if I went through all that I would be paranoid as well.
- neaden 4y ago
  His paranoia started before this. Edit: I want to be clear here, the police can absolutely be abusive to paranoid people, and people struggling with mental illness might seem to be acting suspiciously or weirdly by the police who have no training in dealing with mental health. It's very possible Bobby was acting oddly though non criminaly and the police totally mishandled it, he certainly shouldn't have been arrested. But his exact claims of what happened need to be viewed with the knowledge he frequently made false accusations throughout his life.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - lostlogin 4y ago
    > the police who have no training in dealing with mental health. This in itself is a conscious choice. Someone had chosen not to train the officers.
toast0 4y ago
If you ignore the assumptions he made about the motives about the other participants in his story, most of it is pretty well within the shape of expected behavior. Person is stopped on the street because of looking like suspect. On closer look, doesn't actually look like suspect but acts oddly and invites police to arrest him. They arrest him, and are not gentle with the handcuffs or putting him into the car. The actual suspect is caught elsewhere, but Bobby is arrested on suspicion of acting oddly, not of being the bank robber, so no reason to let him go. The part about choking him during interrogation, I dunno, anyway they interrogated him and were unsatisfied. Placed naked into empty cell with the light on seems like normal procedure (whether that's right or wrong) for someone arrested for behaving oddly; then being transferred to solitary doesn't seem out of the norm either. That they were considering sending him to a mental hospital and concerned about suicide is consistent with that treatment. Bobby offers that he was doing a lot of screaming and what not during this time. Eventually, someone in charge takes a look in and asks direct questions and Bobby gets his clothes back and his phone call and released. This isn't treatment I'd like to have, and I'd like for it not to be normal, but unfortunately, it's pretty much normal, so I don't think there's a whole lot to be skeptical about --- with the exception of the choking. That could have happened, or it might not have, I don't know if that was really normal or not; I think a lot of interrogations are now video recorded for many reasons, but probably not in 1981

marcodiego 4y ago

I wonder how credible this could be considering that Bobby Fischer eventually turned into a conspiracist and and international shame to the US. A bright mind that had its ghosts.

moss2 4y ago
That's a self-fulfilling prophecy. If I was subjected to torture by a judicial institution for no reason what-so-ever, I would also be traumatized by the events and turn into a conspiracy theorist.
- neaden 4y ago
  He wanted the millitary to take over and execute all the Jewish people in the country, whom he blamed for all his problems. Many people are treated poorly by the police and don't start advocating genocide.
  - HideousKojima 4y ago
    A lot of Bobby Fischer's quotes about Jews are almost kind of funny in a horrifying/ironic way when you realize he was a Jew himself spouting stuff that would fit perfectly at a skinhead rally.
    - neaden 4y ago
      Well he denied being a Jew, though his mother was he said he never was raised Jewish in any way. So while he met the Jewish definition of being Jewish it's not a label he would ever use for himself.
      - whateveracct 4y ago
        Usually when people talk about genocide of Jews, they don't care if they're practicing or were raised that way.

bongoman37 4y ago

While a lot of people are looking at the claims in the article with skepticism, the claims are actually pretty run of the mill. US police does do these kind of things and worse fairly routinely, anybody who knows cops will find that they joke about it fairly often and anybody who knows people who have had run-ins with the cop will attest that this is pretty plausible. A cop friend I had told me with a straight face that there are no innocent men in jails. His reasoning was that there are lots of things that you are guilty of but never charged with like think of all the times you got away with speeding. So even if a particular man is innocent of the crime he is jail for, it doesn't matter because there are things that he should be in jail for but isn't. Ergo, no innocent people in jails.

the_optimist 4y ago
People who aren’t cops also harbor plenty of unusual conceptions of justice, which is why we have attempted to formalize and codify essential aspects of justice in the law. The cops are supposed to be informed of, enforce, and of course abide by the law. Lawfare now featuring prominently in the US suggests that in practice we have now reached far higher levels of abstract guile and malfeasance than what is indicated here.

nanna 4y ago

Reading this it's hard to not agree with Huey P Newton's assesment of the police as 'brutal, gross and uncairing', or 'pigs', especially when such behaviour systematically characterised(/s) their interaction with blacks.

mistrial9 4y ago
Huey Newton himself was an explicit racist, ghetto thug, bully and thief .. attracting exactly the kind of stupid enforcement that typically deals with that kind of thing, every day for years. Neither side is innocent.. far from it..
- wutangson1 4y ago
  Lol. Was Bobby Seale a ‘ghetto thug’, a ‘bully’, & a ‘thief’? Was Fred Hampton all the above as well? If Fred Hampton was, then why not just proudly say who in government ordered for him to be assassinated in his sleep?
  - mistrial9 4y ago
    no I did not say that .. and Huey Newton is complicated by social interactions and media attention over time which changed the man and changed his social surroundings. There is a knee-jerk crowd that rose to his defense at the time, as it is happening now in these comments. "revolutionary" was not a coincidental term. Gun violence is practiced daily in Oakland, California.
    - wutangson1 4y ago
      I agree. The actual man, the celebrity from media, and the pressure from domestic intelligence agencies would effect anyone. But, just as there is nuance in understanding Huey P. Newton, surely there is the same nuance for people for whom his message resonated with- beyond being merely 'knee jerk'. Regular gun violence in Oakland does not make everyone in Oakland a bad person, or a criminal or an accessory to criminal behavior

pliptvo 4y ago

All the ad hominem attacks on Bobby Fisher in this thread are by the by. One can accept that he was paranoid, conspiratorial and antisemitic -- which I do -- whilst also accepting that he was subjected to the police violence he describes in this account. Many people with mental health issues are subjected to violence, by police or otherwise; to refuse to believe them merely on account of their mental health is itself a function of the violence which puts them in harms way in the first place.

hydrok9 4y ago

In more recent news: https://abc13.com/pasadena-police-accused-brutality-cavazos-family/11824334/ https://abc13.com/pasadena-police-accused-brutality-cavazos-...

PraetorianGourd 4y ago
Different Pasadena. Yeah the cops can be cunts but that doesn’t justify lazy link-baiting.

webdoodle 4y ago

I always find it interesting that after his disappearance, he ended up being found living in Japan, with a fellow chess master friend. Even after all that time, the U.S. still attempted to prosecute him.

stefantalpalaru 4y ago