Unbelievable as it may seem, The Guardian is reporting today that the Chicago Police Department operates its own “Black Site” where people are taken, tortured and held in shackles without notification of family or the ability to have a lawyer present. One man is alleged to have died there after having been beaten. Shades of the “Disappeared” from the days a military junta ruled Argentina, but its happening here and now in a major city in the United States, and the place is known as “Homan Square.”
The Chicago police department operates an off-the-books interrogation compound, rendering Americans unable to be found by family or attorneys while locked inside what lawyers say is the domestic equivalent of a CIA black site.
The facility, a nondescript warehouse on Chicago’s west side known as Homan Square, has long been the scene of secretive work by special police units. Interviews with local attorneys and one protester who spent the better part of a day shackled in Homan Square describe operations that deny access to basic constitutional rights. […]
At least one man was found unresponsive in a Homan Square “interview room” and later pronounced dead.
Activities alleged to have occurred there include the following:
- Detainees are kept out of the official police booking system.
- Persons in custody are often shackled for long periods of time.
- Attorneys are denied access to their clients
- Frequent beatings, causing head injuries
- Juveniles as young as 15 have been housed there
The facility also houses military-style vehicles. Defense attorneys, however are well aware of its existence:
Witnesses, suspects or other Chicagoans who end up inside do not appear to have a public, searchable record entered into a database indicating where they are, as happens when someone is booked at a precinct. Lawyers and relatives insist there is no way of finding their whereabouts. Those lawyers who have attempted to gain access to Homan Square are most often turned away, even as their clients remain in custody inside.
“It’s sort of an open secret among attorneys that regularly make police station visits, this place – if you can’t find a client in the system, odds are they’re there,” said Chicago lawyer Julia Bartmes.
Chicago civil-rights attorney Flint Taylor said Homan Square represented a routinization of a notorious practice in local police work that violates the fifth and sixth amendments of the constitution.
And just being a protestor can get you arrested and sent there, as Jacob Church, an activist who opposed the NATO Summit in 2012, discovered when he was arrested by police and “disappeared” there:
Jacob Church learned about Homan Square the hard way. On May 16 2012, he and 11 others were taken there after police infiltrated their protest against the Nato summit. Church says officers cuffed him to a bench for an estimated 17 hours, intermittently interrogating him without reading his Miranda rights to remain silent. It would take another three hours – and an unusual lawyer visit through a wire cage – before he was finally charged with terrorism-related offenses at the nearby 11th district station, where he was made to sign papers, fingerprinted and photographed.
Church is now on parole. He and two other co-defendants were found not guilty of terrorism charges at their trial, but were convicted on two lesser offenses: “possessing an incendiary device and the misdemeanor of “mob action”.” Church was the only one of the three willing to talk to the Guardian’s reporters. The others refused fearing retaliation from police if they spoke about their experiences at Homan Square.
It is outrageous that the federal government operates such “black sites” around the world. That one would exist in a major American city, however, run by that City’s own police department is more than outrageous to me. It’s downright terrifying. Who knows if other police departments around the country have their own Homan Squares where anyone of us could be deprived of our constitutional rights with impunity for any reason, or no reason at all.
Please read the Guardian’s article about this domestic black site run by the Chicago PD in its entirety. I assure you, it is well worth the time and effort. Then ask yourself, if it is happening there, where else in our country might also be operating such sinister and illegal detention sites?
