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Chicago police “disappeared” more than 7,000 people at a black site in the U.S. city, The Guardian has revealed, almost double the figure officially released.
In an 11-year period up to June 2015, almost 6,000 detainees in the Homan Square warehouse were Black, demonstrating disproportionate racial targeting.
“Not much shakes me in this business – baby murder, sex assault, I’ve done it all,” David Gaeger, a lawyer whose client was taken to Homan Square in 2011 for a low-level drugs crime told the British newspaper. “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.”
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The Guardian discovered in an ongoing transparency lawsuit and investigation that almost a third of inmates were held incommunicado: denied access to attorneys or a public notice of their location.
Contrary to the Chicago police line that officers “follow all the rules,” detainees and their lawyers have complained of shocking treatment.
Jose, a 30-year-old-man who was fortunate that his attorney was present when he gave himself up to officers, described being questioned even after his lawyer told the warehouse’s staff he would not speak.
“The Fillmore and Homan boys,” Jose said, referring to police and the facility’s cross streets, “don’t play by the rules.”
The Guardian found that the warehouse was and still is the home of anti-narcotics, vice and gang operations, where suspects from all across the city are taken.
Alarmingly, once suspects arrive, no booking records are generated at Homan Square, rendering the detainees “disappeared.”
“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.”
Homan Square officers, however, claimed in February, “If lawyers have a client detained at Homan Square, just like any other facility, they are allowed to speak to and visit them.”
Twenty-two former inmates told The Guardian that they were held for hours or days and pressured to become informants while being denied access to phone calls, while demographic statistics show consistent disproportionality in race.
The Guardian reported that while 82.2 percent of people detained at Homan Square were Black, Black people make up just 32.9 percent Chicago’s population. Just how disproportionate this is is further revealed when other racial backgrounds are analyzed. Almost 29 percent of Chicago’s population is of Latin American origin, yet they make up just 11.8 percent of detainees. White people, who make up 31.7 percent of the general population, represent just 5.5 percent of Homan Square detainees.
Detainees complained that the center routinely denied them the right to an attorney, preying on their vulnerability and ignorance.
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“That’s what they do, man: they get people who don’t know their rights,” a man called Jose told The Guardian. “They squeeze people, and then they go get somebody else. That’s what they do.”
In May, a former detainee alleged that he was sexually assaulted at Homan Square, when officers inserted something into his rectum.
“I felt the coldness and the metallic aspect of it,” Angel Perez told the Guardian. Perez said that his ordeal occurred to coerce him into buying US$170 worth of heroin from a dealer.
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