Homan Square revealed: how Chicago police 'disappeared' 7,000 people

[bananas]

Source: Guardian

Exclusive: Guardian lawsuit exposes fullest scale yet of detentions at off-the-books interrogation warehouse, while attorneys describe find-your-client chase across Chicago as ‘something from a Bond movie’

Police “disappeared” more than 7,000 people at an off-the-books interrogation warehouse in Chicago, nearly twice as many detentions as previously disclosed, the Guardian can now reveal.

From August 2004 to June 2015, nearly 6,000 of those held at the facility were black, which represents more than twice the proportion of the city’s population. But only 68 of those held were allowed access to attorneys or a public notice of their whereabouts, internal police records show.

The new disclosures, the result of an ongoing Guardian transparency lawsuit and investigation, provide the most detailed, full-scale portrait yet of the truth about Homan Square, a secretive facility that Chicago police have described as little more than a low-level narcotics crime outpost where the mayor has said police “follow all the rules”.

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Read more: http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/oct/19/homan-square-chicago-police-disappeared-thousands

[SoapBox]

1. My gawd...

What the hell has happened to America?

[PatSeg]

2. I saw something like this

in an episode of The Good Wife. I didn't know it was based on something that was real.

Edit to add link about The Good Wife episode:

http://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2015/may/11/the-good-wife-finale-homan-square

[lonestarnot]

3. And the disappeared have never reappeared?

[Eugene]

4. Chicago sued for 'unconstitutional and torturous' Homan Square police abuse

Source: The Guardian

Chicago sued for 'unconstitutional and torturous' Homan Square police abuse

Zach Stafford in Chicago
Monday 19 October 2015 16.50 BST

Chicago police “physically and psychologically abused” three wrongfully imprisoned black men at Homan Square, according to a new lawsuit, which details an officer holding a knife to one man’s throat as two others underwent strip searches and all were short-shackled without access to food, water, bathrooms, families or legal counsel.

The federal civil rights lawsuit, filed on Monday against six officers and the city of Chicago, alleges the use of “unconstitutionally coercive and torturous tactics” and connects the practices at Homan Square to a pattern of racially motivated policing.

In the suit, the third since the Guardian began an investigation into the secretive police compound, Atheris Mann, Jessie Patrick and Deanda Wilson charge that they were coerced into providing false information through a series of physical, verbal and psychological assaults at the facility which their attorney said “does fit into torture under the United Nations definition”.

These interrogation techniques included:

An officer holding a knife to Wilson’s neck, then slicing off parts of his hooded sweatshirt after he requested an attorney and refused to supply information on drug-dealing in his neighborhood, where he was picked up by officers while buying a soda.

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Read more: http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/oct/19/chicago-homan-square-police-abuse-lawsuit

[azurnoir]

5. Rahm's Chicago

The facility’s use by police has intensified in recent years. Nearly 65% of documented Homan Square arrests since August 2004 took place in the five years since Rahm Emanuel, formerly Barack Obama’s top aide, became mayor. (The Guardian has filed a Foia request with Emanuel’s office to disclose the extent of its involvement in Homan Square.)

http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/oct/19/homan-square-chicago-police-disappeared-thousands

[whereisjustice]

6. Being a Democrat is a lot like being a Republican these days, isn't it? We're all one big happy

right-wing family.

Speaking as a non-right-wing idiot let me say - Jesus, Rahm is a giant asshole. Seriously. What a goddamn prick.

Democratic Party should be in his face 24/7. Instead the party is on it's knees trying to look tough on crime.

Hillary will bring more of this shit. That's what a Hillary candidacy means.

Thanks, DNC. Even with bullshit like this, you can't speak out forcefully and unequivocally.

Assholes.

“Not much shakes me in this business – baby murder, sex assault, I’ve done it all,” said David Gaeger, an attorney whose client was taken to Homan Square in 2011 after being arrested for marijuana. “That place was and is scary. It’s a scary place. There’s nothing about it that resembles a police station. It comes from a Bond movie or something.”

The narcotics, vice and anti-gang units operating out of Homan Square, on Chicago’s west side, take arrestees to the nondescript warehouse from all over the city: police data obtained by the Guardian and mapped against the city grid show that 53% of disclosed arrestees come from more than 2.5 miles away from the warehouse. No contemporaneous public record of someone’s presence at Homan Square is known to exist.

Nor are any booking records generated at Homan Square, as confirmed by a sworn deposition of a police researcher in late September, further preventing relatives or attorneys from finding someone taken there.

“The reality is, no one knows where that person is at Homan Square,” said Craig Futterman, a professor at the University of Chicago Law School who studies policing. “They’re disappeared at that point.”

[Midnight Writer]

7. And we read about this in The London Guardian and not the American press, why?

I spoke to a young friend of mine recently who subscribes online to the Guardian. I asked him why. He replied "Because I want to know what is really going on here".