The Twisted Gun

What does a lifetime of violence actually do to a city, once you get past the numbers and stand on the block where it lives?

DJ Sikorski set out to answer that from the inside. In 2021 he embedded for a year in Chicago's violence, and what he found was that the present he was reporting could not be read without its context, a half-century of corruption inside the Chicago Police Department.

Across two braided narratives, one a present-tense year in the neighborhoods, the other a fifty-year reckoning with the department's torture, frame-ups, robbery crews, and cover-ups, Sikorski goes looking for the cause of the violence and finds no version of it simple enough to blame. What began as an assignment becomes a personal reckoning: with the city, with the year, and with how much of it he carried home and still cannot put down.

Unflinching, deeply reported, and honest about how much it leaves unresolved.

DJ Sikorski is an Emmy-nominated investigative journalist and documentary filmmaker whose credits include Live PD and Police 24/7. He has spent nearly three decades reporting from inside American law enforcement and the organized underworld.