When a grand jury indicted three Chicago policemen last week for assaults on civilians, not a peep of protest emerged from the Chicago Tribune, a longtime champion of the city's 13,000 men in blue. Reason: the Trib 's own reporting had prompted the indictments, as well as continuing investigations of five other patrolmen. Five months of relentless digging had produced an eight-part series that is probably the most thorough examination of police brutality ever published in a U.S. newspaper.
A teen-ager lost his left eye after being slugged by a policeman on the prowl for a much older suspect. An upper-middle-class...