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CNN —

There’s a fascinating new podcast series from CNN’s Omar Jimenez about systemic torture carried out by the Chicago police department over many years starting in the 1980s.

There were startling revelations, cops put in jail and millions in damages ultimately paid by the city.

Jimenez first learned about the stories when he was in college. Years later, after his own experiences covering stories like the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis, he and a team have produced an engaging look at American justice.

The podcast focuses on a few different characters, including James Gibson, who was wrongly convicted and tortured, Andrew Wilson, whose guilt for killing two police officers has not been questioned even as people learned of his torture, and Jon Burge, a police commander who oversaw torture.

The podcast also comes at a time when President Donald Trump is threatening to send the National Guard into Chicago, ostensibly to clean up the city, no matter what local officials want.

I talked to Jimenez about the project and justice in Chicago. Our conversation, edited for length, is below.

A project years in the making

WOLF: This is not your typical CNN project and you came to it in an atypical way. It sounds like it’s been years in the making.

JIMENEZ: When I was a student at Northwestern, I was interning and working with the Chicago Innocence Project, where they reinvestigate potential wrongful conditions. I came across this guy who worked with that group who told me about being tortured by this police commander and his unit in Chicago. He had spent decades in prison and was eventually exonerated.

I couldn’t believe what he was telling me.