Revealed: Chicago Police Struck and Tasered Prisoners at Off-the-Books Interrogation Site
Internal Chicago Police Department documents obtained by The Guardian show that officers used physical force on at least 14 men in custody. The violence occurred at a warehouse in Homan Square.
Quinn Dombrowski / CC BY-SA 2.0
Internal Chicago Police Department documents obtained by The Guardian show that officers used physical force on at least 14 men in custody. The violence occurred at a warehouse in Homan Square.
According to an account by Dwand Ivery, arrested on a drug-distribution charge: “I was struck with multiple blows with open and closed fist by two officers. My shoes was eventually removed and they began to strike me in my head and face area with those as well. I felt my face start to swell and deform instantly. This lasted for multiple minutes,” until a plainclothes officer who heard the commotion told the other cops that Ivery had had enough.
Spencer Ackerman reports at The Guardian:
Police used punches, knee strikes, elbow strikes, slaps, wrist twists, baton blows and Tasers at Homan Square, according to documents released to the Guardian in the course of its transparency lawsuit about the warehouse. The new information contradicts an official denial about treatment of prisoners at the facility.
The injured men are among at least 7,351 people – over 6,000 of them black – who, police documents show, have been detained and interrogated at Homan Square without a public notice of their whereabouts or access to an attorney.
None of the men identified in these newest documents had fled custody or were injured in the course of a lawful arrest. All were subject to force by Chicago police officers after they were already in custody at Homan Square. According to depositions with officers and more than two dozen first-hand accounts, handcuffing is standard. Police applied force to some arrestees sufficient enough to warrant hospitalization.
Some of those injured by police inside Homan Square told the Guardian they have experienced chronic pain or impairment years later. One said he was instructed by police to lie about his strangulation, which police claimed on an official form resulted from the already-handcuffed man “manag[ing] to put another flex cuff around his neck”.
—Posted by Alexander Reed Kelly.
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