Chicago Police Detain Americans At
Abuse-laden 'Black Site'
Exclusive: Secret
interrogation facility reveals aspects of
war on terror in US
‘They disappeared us’: protester details
17-hour shackling without basic rights
Accounts describe police brutality, missing
15-year-old and one man’s death
February 24, 2015 "ICH"
- "The
Guardian" -
The
Chicago police department operates an
off-the-books interrogation compound,
rendering Americans unable to be found by
family or attorneys while locked inside what
lawyers say is the domestic equivalent of a
CIA black site.
The facility, a
nondescript warehouse on Chicago’s west side
known as Homan Square, has long been the
scene of secretive work by special police
units. Interviews with local attorneys and
one protester who spent the better part of a
day shackled in Homan Square describe
operations that deny access to basic
constitutional rights.
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.
At least one man was found
unresponsive in a Homan Square “interview
room” and later pronounced dead.
Brian Jacob Church, a
protester known as one of the “Nato Three”,
was held and questioned at Homan Square in
2012 following a police raid. Officers
restrained Church for the better part of a
day, denying him access to an attorney,
before sending him to a nearby police
station to be booked and charged.
“Homan Square
is definitely an unusual place,” Church told
the Guardian on Friday. “It brings to mind
the interrogation facilities they use in the
Middle East. The CIA calls them black sites.
It’s a domestic black site. When you go in,
no one knows what’s happened to you.”
The secretive warehouse is
the latest example of Chicago police
practices that echo the much-criticized
detention abuses of the US war on terrorism.
While those abuses impacted people overseas,
Homan Square – said to house military-style
vehicles, interrogation cells and even a
cage – trains its focus on Americans, most
often poor, black and brown.
Unlike a precinct, no one
taken to Homan Square is said to be booked.
Witnesses, suspects or other Chicagoans who
end up inside do not appear to have a
public, searchable record entered into a
database indicating where they are, as
happens when someone is booked at a
precinct. Lawyers and relatives insist there
is no way of finding their whereabouts.
Those lawyers who have attempted to gain
access to Homan Square are most often turned
away, even as their clients remain in
custody inside.
“It’s sort of an open
secret among attorneys that regularly make
police station visits, this place – if you
can’t find a client in the system, odds are
they’re there,” said Chicago lawyer Julia
Bartmes.
Chicago civil-rights
attorney Flint Taylor said Homan Square
represented a routinization of a notorious
practice in local police work that violates
the fifth and sixth amendments of the
constitution.
“This Homan Square
revelation seems to me to be an
institutionalization of the practice that
dates back more than 40 years,” Taylor said,
“of violating a suspect or witness’ rights
to a lawyer and not to be physically or
otherwise coerced into giving a statement.”
Much remains hidden about
Homan Square. The Chicago police department
has not responded to any of the Guardian’s
recent questions – neither about any aspect
of operations at Homan Square, nor about
the Guardian’s investigation of Richard
Zuley,
the retired Chicago detective turned
Guantánamo Bay torturer. (On Monday
evening, it instead provided
a statement to MSNBC regarding the
Guardian’s Zuley investigation: “The vast
majority of our officers serve the public
with honor and integrity,” said the
statement, adding that the department “has
zero tolerance for misconduct, and has
instituted a series of internal initiatives
and reforms, to ensure past incidents of
police misconduct are not repeated”. Without
providing any specifics, it claimed “the
allegations in this instance are not
supported by the facts.”)
When a Guardian reporter
arrived at the warehouse on Friday, a man at
the gatehouse outside refused any entrance
and would not answer questions. “This is a
secure facility. You’re not even supposed to
be standing here,” said the man, who refused
to give his name.
A former Chicago police
superintendent and a more recently retired
detective, both of whom have been inside
Homan Square in the last few years in a
post-police capacity, said the police
department did not operate out of the
warehouse until the late 1990s.
But in detailing episodes
involving their clients over the past
several years, lawyers described mad
scrambles that led to the closed doors of
Homan Square, a place most had never heard
of previously. The facility was even unknown
to Rob Warden, the founder of Northwestern
University Law School’s Center on Wrongful
Convictions, until the Guardian informed him
of the allegations of clients who vanish
into inherently coercive police custody.
“They just disappear,”
said Anthony Hill, a criminal defense
attorney, “until they show up at a district
for charging or are just released back out
on the street.”
Jacob Church learned about
Homan Square the hard way. On
May 16 2012, he and 11 others were taken
there after police infiltrated their protest
against the Nato summit. Church says
officers cuffed him to a bench for an
estimated 17 hours, intermittently
interrogating him without reading his
Miranda rights to remain silent. It would
take another three hours – and an unusual
lawyer visit through a wire cage – before he
was finally charged with terrorism-related
offenses at the nearby 11th district
station, where he was made to sign papers,
fingerprinted and photographed.
In preparation for the
Nato protest, Church, who is from Florida,
had written a phone number for the National
Lawyers Guild on his arm as a precautionary
measure. Once taken to Homan Square, Church
asked explicitly to call his lawyers, and
said he was denied.
“Essentially, I wasn’t
allowed to make any contact with anybody,”
Church told the Guardian, in contradiction
of a police guidance on permitting phone
calls and legal counsel to arrestees.
Church’s left wrist was
cuffed to a bar behind a bench in windowless
cinderblock cell, with his ankles cuffed
together. He remained in those restraints
for about 17 hours.
“I had essentially
figured, ‘All right, well, they disappeared
us and so we’re probably never going to see
the light of day again,’” Church said.
Though the raid attracted
major media attention, a team of attorneys
could not find Church through 12 hours of
“active searching”, Sarah Gelsomino,
Church’s lawyer, recalled. No booking record
existed. Only after she and others made a
“major stink” with contacts in the offices
of the corporation counsel and Mayor Rahm
Emanuel did they even learn about Homan
Square.
They sent another attorney
to the facility, where he ultimately gained
entry, and talked to Church through a
floor-to-ceiling chain-link metal cage.
Finally, hours later, police took Church and
his two co-defendants to a nearby police
station for booking.
After serving two and a
half years in prison, Church is currently on
parole after he and his co-defendants were
found
not guilty in 2014 of terrorism-related
offenses but guilty of lesser charges of
possessing an incendiary device and the
misdemeanor of “mob action”.
The access that Nato Three
attorneys received to Homan Square was an
exception to the rule, even if Jacob
Church’s experience there was not.
Three attorneys
interviewed by the Guardian report being
personally turned away from Homan Square
between 2009 and 2013 without being allowed
access to their clients. Two more lawyers
who hadn’t been physically denied described
it as a place where police withheld
information about their clients’
whereabouts. Church was the only person who
had been detained at the facility who agreed
to talk with the Guardian: their lawyers say
others fear police retaliation.
One man in January 2013
had his name changed in the Chicago central
bookings database and then taken to Homan
Square without a record of his transfer
being kept, according to Eliza Solowiej of
Chicago’s First Defense Legal Aid. (The man,
the Guardian understands, wishes to be
anonymous; his current attorney declined to
confirm Solowiej’s account.) She found out
where he was after he was taken to the
hospital with a head injury.
“He said that the officers
caused his head injuries in an interrogation
room at Homan Square. I had been looking for
him for six to eight hours, and every
department member I talked to said they had
never heard of him,” Solowiej said. “He sent
me a phone pic of his head injuries because
I had seen him in a police station right
before he was transferred to Homan Square
without any.”
Bartmes, another Chicago
attorney, said that in September 2013 she
got a call from a mother worried that her
15-year-old son had been picked up by police
before dawn. A sympathetic sergeant followed
up with the mother to say her son was being
questioned at Homan Square in connection to
a shooting and would be released soon. When
hours passed, Bartmes traveled to Homan
Square, only to be refused entry for nearly
an hour.
An officer told her,
“Well, you can’t just stand here taking
notes, this is a secure facility, there are
undercover officers, and you’re making
people very nervous,” Bartmes recalled. Told
to leave, she said she would return in an
hour if the boy was not released. He was
home, and not charged, after “12, maybe 13”
hours in custody.
On February 2, 2013, John
Hubbard was taken to Homan Square. Hubbard
never walked out. The Chicago Tribune
reported that the 44-year old was found “unresponsive
inside an interview room”, and
pronounced dead. The Cook County medical
examiner’s office could not locate any
record for the Guardian indicating a cause
of Hubbard’s death. It remains unclear why
Hubbard was ever in police custody.
Homan Square is hardly
concerned exclusively with terrorism.
Several special units operate outside of it,
including the anti-gang and anti-drug
forces. If police “want money, guns, drugs”,
or information on the flow of any of them
onto Chicago’s streets, “they bring them
there and use it as a place of interrogation
off the books,” Hill said.
A former Chicago detective
and current private investigator, Bill
Dorsch, said he had not heard of the police
abuses described by Church and lawyers for
other suspects who had been taken to Homan
Square. He has been permitted access to the
facility to visit one of its main features,
an evidence locker for the police
department. (“I just showed my retirement
star and passed through,” Dorsch said.)
Transferring detainees
through police custody to deny them access
to legal counsel, would be “a career-ender,”
Dorsch said. “To move just for the purpose
of hiding them, I can’t see that happening,”
he told the Guardian.
Richard Brzeczek,
Chicago’s police superintendent from 1980 to
1983, who also said he had no first-hand
knowledge of abuses at Homan Square, said it
was “never justified” to deny access to
attorneys.
“Homan Square should be on
the same list as every other facility where
you can call central booking and say: ‘Can
you tell me if this person is in custody and
where,’” Brzeczek said.
“If you’re going to be
doing this, then you have to include Homan
Square on the list of facilities that
prisoners are taken into and a record made.
It can’t be an exempt facility.”
Indeed, Chicago police
guidelines appear to ban the sorts of
practices Church and the lawyers said occur
at Homan Square.
A directive titled “Processing
Persons Under Department Control”
instructs that “investigation or
interrogation of an arrestee will not delay
the booking process,” and arrestees must be
allowed “a reasonable number of telephone
calls” to attorneys swiftly “after their
arrival at the first place of custody.”
Another directive, “Arrestee
and In-Custody Communications,” says
police supervisors must “allow visitation by
attorneys.”
Attorney Scott Finger said
that the Chicago police tightened the latter
directive in 2012 after quiet complaints
from lawyers about their lack of access to
Homan Square. Without those changes,
Church’s attorneys might not have gained
entry at all. But that tightening – about a
week before Church’s arrest – did not
prevent Church’s prolonged detention without
a lawyer, nor the later cases where lawyers
were unable to enter.
The combination of holding
clients for long periods, while concealing
their whereabouts and denying access to a
lawyer, struck legal experts as a throwback
to the worst excesses of Chicago police
abuse, with a post-9/11 feel to it.
On a smaller scale, Homan
Square is “analogous to the CIA’s black
sites,” said Andrea Lyon, a former Chicago
public defender and current dean of
Valparaiso University Law School. When she
practiced law in Chicago in the 1980s and
1990s, she said, “police used the term
‘shadow site’” to refer to the
quasi-disappearances now in place at Homan
Square.
“Back when I first started
working on torture cases and started
representing criminal defendants in the
early 1970s, my clients often told me they’d
been taken from one police station to
another before ending up at Area 2 where
they were tortured,” said Taylor, the
civil-rights lawyer most associated with
pursuing the notoriously abusive Area 2
police commander Jon Burge. “And in that way
the police prevent their family and lawyers
from seeing them until they could coerce,
through torture or other means, confessions
from them.”
Police often have off-site
facilities to have private conversations
with their informants. But a retired
Washington DC homicide detective, James
Trainum, could not think of another
circumstance nationwide where police held
people incommunicado for extended periods.
“I’ve never known any kind
of organized, secret place where they go and
just hold somebody before booking for hours
and hours and hours. That scares the hell
out of me that that even exists or might
exist,” said Trainum, who now studies
national policing issues, to include
interrogations, for the Innocence Project
and the Constitution Project.
Regardless of departmental
regulations, police frequently deny or elide
access to lawyers even at regular police
precincts, said Solowiej of First Defense
Legal Aid. But she said the outright denial
was exacerbated at Chicago’s secretive
interrogation and holding facility: “It’s
very, very rare for anyone to experience
their constitutional rights in Chicago
police custody, and even more so at Homan
Square,” Solowiej said.
Church said that one of
his more striking memories of Homan Square
was the “big, big vehicles” police had
inside the complex that “look like very
large MRAPs that they use in the Middle
East.”
Cook County, home of
Chicago, has received some 1,700 pieces of
military equipment from a much-criticized
Pentagon program transferring military gear
to local police. It includes a Humvee,
according to a
local ABC News report.
“The real danger in
allowing practices like Guantánamo or Abu
Ghraib is the fact that they always creep
into other aspects,” Siska said.
“They creep into domestic
law enforcement, either with weaponry like
with the militarization of police, or
interrogation practices. That’s how we ended
up with a black site in Chicago.”
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