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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsChicago Police Detained Thousands of Black Americans at Interrogation Facility--New Report 8/5/15:
Special report: Guardian lawsuit reveals overwhelming racial disparity at Homan Square, where detainees are still held for minor crimes with little access to the outside world, despite police denials that site is an anomalySpencer Ackerman and Zach Stafford in Chicago
Wednesday 5 August 2015 12.56 EDT
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 citys most vulnerable people get lost in its criminal justice system.
People held at Homan Square have been subsequently charged with everything from drinking alcohol on the public way to murder. But the scale of the detentions and the racial disparity therein raises the prospect of major civil-rights violations.
Documents indicate the detainees are a group of disproportionately minority citizens, many accused of low-level drug crimes, faced with incriminating themselves before their arrests appeared in a booking system by which their families and attorneys might find them.
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. There are always records of anyone who is arrested by CPD, and this is no different at Homan Square, the police asserted in a March statement.
But an independent Guardian analysis of arrestees records, obtained through the Freedom of Information Act, shows that Homan Square is far from normal:
More than 82% of the Homan Square arrests thus far disclosed or 2,974 arrests are of black people, while 8.5% are of white people. Chicago, according to the 2010 US census, is 33% black and 32% white.
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.
Contained within the statistics are stories of people held at Homan Square in and under questionable circumstances:
One young man, held at the warehouse for 14 hours without any public listing of his whereabouts, was just shy of his 18th birthday; the courts sentenced him to community service and probation.
Another man, not included in the disclosed data, said he fled Chicago after resisting police pressure to become an informant during multiple stints inside Homan Square.
The revelations are by no means a full accounting of police detentions at Homan Square, which Chicago has owned since 1995. The records only date from late 2004 and they exclude people eventually released without charge. After months of disputing the Guardians reporting, the Chicago police only made detailed information available after the Guardian sued them for it. Vast amounts of data documenting the full scope of detentions and interrogations at Homan Square remain undisclosed.
Much More at..
http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/aug/05/homan-square-chicago-thousands-detained
tblue37
(65,377 posts)Rex
(65,616 posts)And how many other big cities have such things that are still in operation and unknown to the general public? And we make fun of Syria for allowing the CIA to torture people in their nation...guilt free.
Can't make fun of Syria no more, WE are Syria and black people seem to be the state's enemy of choice.
Why is that? Why do we have to depend on the guardian to tell us this? Rhetorical...we all know why the M$M will never bite the hand that feeds it.
KoKo
(84,711 posts)And those are our biggest population areas....
But, that doesn't mean that it isn't going on in our other Cities where they have these Detention Sites or that our Militarized Police aren't operating Smaller Cities or in Towns Across America, under cover!
If the Guardian had to do a FOIA Request to get what little horrific info they could...then what about other "Dark Sites" across USA where the City/Town only has one "Bought and Paid for Newspaper" (too afraid to do a FOIA Request) and with Local Media owned by the BIG FIVE Media Conglomerations which employs people in their town?
How would we know how many of these sites are out there, these days?
Comrade Grumpy
(13,184 posts)People getting "disappeared."
Who's in charge in Chicago?
KoKo
(84,711 posts)...are Now able to be used on ALL OF US...but Particularly on POC who have suffered through this for how long?
It is BACK! (Actually...it never went away).
Yet there is so little interest in this post, it seems. Not shocking because people know its going on? They are immune to it?
malaise
(269,015 posts)will only make this spread
KoKo
(84,711 posts)to our Local Police Departmens and the Terrorist Training of Local US Ciy Police Chiefs over in Israel and Other Countries to bring back to America. There wasn't much interest here on DU that one would have thought when Ferguson and other horrific events occurred as to how this was happening...what was behind it using Terrorism Training to go after POC as if they were ISIS threats. And, it won't stop with POC and people need to wake up and realize that.
Detention Centers where AbuGraib style tactics could be used? What about those people who did those tactics in foreign countries where we have "interests" and now they can be employed back here in the USA as civilians employed in our local Police Departments to do their evil stuff with no one monitoring them? What about Chicago? This all came up months ago and its sounding worse than the original reports which were bad enough.
malaise
(269,015 posts)and shook my head - did you see their gear - looked like Iraq after the invasion and occupation - it's frightening.
KoKo
(84,711 posts)This should NOT be tolerated. I think Obama said he was looking into it and would make sure Police Departments had more limited access to our excess Military Equipment (the ones we used to fight Terrorists) but, he didn't say he would ask them to give the equipment (M-Raps, Helicopters, Night Vision Equipment plus advanced Military Weapons and other Hardware and Riot Combat Gear) back to the Government.
So...it's all still out there and ready and waiting for use the next time people protest a heinous act or any other grievance which causes "we, the people" to congregate in mass to protest. And, who knows what he hasn't ordered "restricted," that will slip through the regulation in the future.
displacedtexan
(15,696 posts)The Good Wife's client was abducted and held in this warehouse without legal recourse. I thought it was fiction!