Chicago police detained thousands of black Americans at interrogation facility

[Newsjock]

Source: The Guardian

At least 3,500 Americans have been detained inside a Chicago police warehouse described by some of its arrestees as a secretive interrogation facility, newly uncovered records reveal.

Of the thousands held in the facility known as Homan Square over a decade, 82% were black. Only three received documented visits from an attorney, according to a cache of documents obtained when the Guardian sued the police.

Despite repeated denials from the Chicago police department that the warehouse is a secretive, off-the-books anomaly, the Homan Square files begin to show how the city’s most vulnerable people get lost in its criminal justice system.

The Chicago police department has maintained – even as the Guardian reported stories of people being shackled and held for hours or even days, all without legal access – that the warehouse is not a secret facility so much as an undercover police base operating in plain sight. ... But an independent Guardian analysis of arrestees’ records, obtained through the Freedom of Information Act, shows that Homan Square is far from normal:

Read more: http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/aug/05/homan-square-chicago-thousands-detained

[jtuck004]

1. The mail address is Guantanamo, Chicago, Il. n/t

[SoapBox]

2. Isn't it outrageous?!?

There should be tons of arrests for the Domestic Terrorists that have been involved in this.

[DetlefK]

3. So... That's kidnapping, right?

[Frustratedlady]

4. Why does the Guardian have to go after cases like this?

Doesn't Chicago have media that can investigate? It seems like we get more news from the Guardian and Al Jazeera than our own papers.

[JackInGreen]

6. Maybe because

Those papers aren't bought and paid for by us profiting oligarchs? True story.

[erronis]

12. That's why me, and many others are getting our news from foreign sources

Most of the top newspapers and their web sites are controlled by powerful families with interests similar to the ruling class.

Even some of the blogosphere seems to be beholden to vested interests. DU is rife with partisan viewpoints but most of us know to read these with a skeptical eye or two.

My take is to not trust anything that first shows up in print or on the web. See it over a couple of days from different sources and then maybe consider it to be halfway true.

[Frustratedlady]

16. Well, I guess I am more than a little bit naive. I knew the larger papers were corrupt,

but never thought I'd have to rely on the Guardian and Al Jazeera for news of my own country.

Is there anything we can trust anymore?

[valerief]

15. Bwahahaha! You're funny. Imagine an American newspaper accurately covering a story like this.

What would they do with all their dead journalists?

[Frustratedlady]

18. I guess it's time for me to put my skeptic hat on and double-check everything I read.

That's what I relied on DU to do for me, as I couldn't keep up with the good guys and bad guys, who was who. I can't believe the knowledge in this group, however, who knows if they are plants. (See, I've got my hat on!)

What a sad state of affairs.

[valerief]

19. It's impossible to know for sure. And now the bastard pols can **legally** lie about themselves.

Mass. court just ruled it. Who needs billions to get elected when you just need a good story?

[dreamnightwind]

5. K & R, important to expose this - eom

[jalan48]

7. Police state tactics are they?

[FlatBaroque]

8. Mayor Scumbag

Over two-thirds of the arrests at Homan Square thus far revealed – at least 2,522 – occurred under the tenure of Mayor Rahm Emanuel, the former top aide to Barack Obama who has said of Homan Square that the police working under him “follow all the rules”.

[Guy Whitey Corngood]

9. K&FuckinR nt

[Guy Whitey Corngood]

10. Homan Square detainee "I was sexually abused by police at Chicago 'black site'..."

http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/may/14/homan-square-detainee-police-abuse

For psychological reasons, Angel Perez does not call what happened to him rape. But he vividly recalls being taken to Homan Square, a warehouse used by the Chicago police for incommunicado detentions, where police inserted something into his rectum.

“I felt the coldness and the metallic aspect of it,” Perez, 33, told the Guardian.

It was 21 October 2012. The day before, Perez had been driving his Rav-4 on his restaurant delivery route when he says police accosted him, wanting him to contact a drug dealer who they believed Perez knew so they could arrange a sting. But Perez was less cooperative than they had hoped.

Now, Perez was handcuffed by his right wrist to a metal bar behind a bench in an interrogation room on the second floor of Homan Square. Behind him were two police officers that a lawsuit Perez recently re-filed identifies as Jorge Lopez and Edmund Zablocki. They had been threatening him with a stint at the infamously violent Cook County jail if he didn’t cooperate.

“They’re gonna think you’re a little sexy bitch in jail,” Perez recalled one of them saying. The lawsuit quotes Lopez: “I hear that a big black nigger dick feels like a gun up your ass.”

[christx30]

11. In a just country,

the guards would turn around and become prisoners. Everyone involved from the mayor down to the beat cop, anyone that knew about this place and did not come forward, should be in jail.
But this is not a just country. It'll be retroactivly agreed that this is a good thing. The law will be rewritten to allow this to happen.

[elias49]

13. Kick

for the edification of the nationalists on these boards.
America isn't all apple pie and yur momma's arms.
I've always lived here and I'll die here but refuse to be a mindless cheerleader.
When we're wrong we're wrong. When we're evil, we're real good at it.

[Igel]

14. For Rahm's stint as mayor,

the average arrest rate was around 1.7/day. The Guardian said that was increased over previous years. If the Guardian's right that most were held for hours, some for "days" (meaning not "a week or weeks&quot , then you'd expect 5 cells or rooms to be enough for all but peaks. Peaks seem to be around 100/month, which still means that 5 could have handled most of the through traffic. That part of the police's response seems reasonable.

Huge building. Looks like it would hold hundreds, and the idea of a "secret prison" seems to suggest that they were held for months, if not years. The Guardian doesn't even hint at that.

The distribution of arrestees seems to be relatively local to the jail. Not knowing the rest of the jail system in Chicago, I can't tell if the rest of the distribution (mostly S. of the place) seems reasonable.

That the undercover police have a separate place doesn't seem unreasonable. Not sure how to structure it though, to preserve their confidentiality. If you station somebody outside the police stations and take a picture of all the police, "undercover" stops being a useful word. And the job becomes riskier.

I'll wait on the rest, except to wonder why there's such a small Latino population.

[Ilsa]

17. This was actually covered in an episode of The Good Wife

on CBS this spring. The racial aspect wasn't covered in the story, but illegal detention was. Scary episode.