VIDEO: Chicago Police Have ‘Disappeared’ 7,000 People Into Homan Square

Since 2004, Chicago police have “disappeared” more than 7,000 people — nearly twice the number previously disclosed — into an “off-the-books interrogation warehouse,” reports Spencer Ackerman at The Guardian.

The ongoing revelations involve a severe violation of detainees’ constitutional rights — to a lawyer, to not be physically or otherwise coerced into giving a statement, and to be informed of their rights in general. In February, Ackerman reported the following abuses committed by police, according to people “familiar with the facility”:

• Keeping arrestees out of official booking databases. • Beating by police, resulting in head wounds. • Shackling for prolonged periods. • Denying attorneys access to the “secure” facility. • Holding people without legal counsel for between 12 and 24 hours, including people as young as 15.

“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 on marijuana charges, as quoted by Ackerman in an article published Monday. “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.”

Ackerman continues:

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”. …

According to an analysis of data disclosed to the Guardian in late September, police allowed lawyers access to Homan Square for only 0.94% of the 7,185 arrests logged over nearly 11 years. That percentage aligns with Chicago police’s broader practice of providing minimal access to attorneys during the crucial early interrogation stage, when an arrestee’s constitutional rights against self-incrimination are most vulnerable. …

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.” …

The most recent disclosure of Homan Square data provides the scale behind those accounts: the demographic trends within the 7,185 disclosed arrests at the warehouse are now far more vast than what the Guardian reported in August after launching the transparency lawsuit – but are consistently disproportionate in terms of race and constitutional access to legal counsel.

• 82.2% of people detained at Homan Square were black, compared with 32.9% of the Chicago population. • 11.8% of detainees in the Homan Square logs were Hispanic, compared with 28.9% of the population. • 5.5% of the detainees were white, compared with 31.7% of the population. • Of the 68 people who Chicago police claim had access to counsel at Homan Square, however, 45% were black, 26% were Hispanic and another 26% were white.

“Operating a massive, red-brick warehouse between two of the most crime-filled areas in the city of Chicago, equipped with floodlights, cameras, razor-wire – this near-paramilitary wing of the government that we’ve created, I would say that people who live close to it know what purpose it serves the most,” said the attorney Gaeger. “The demographics that surround it speak for themselves.”

Continue reading here.

— Posted by Alexander Reed Kelly.