New reports show that the infamous Chicago “black site” where detainees were allegedly shackled and beaten is even worse than previously believed.
The notorious Homan Square police facility “disappeared” upward of 7,000 of people, Spencer Ackerman of The Guardian reports.
News that authorities were secretly detaining, interrogating, and beating people in a West Chicago warehouse broke in February. But The Guardian has uncovered new details alleging that twice as many as people were detained as originally reported. Of those, only 68 were allowed to see their legal representatives.
“Not much shakes me in this business – baby murder, sex assault, I’ve done it all,” David Gaeger, an lawyer representing a client who was taken to Homan Square in 2011 told The Guardian. “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.”
One of the most alarming discoveries is that many of these detainees were kept off the books, with no record they were even there.
“The reality is, no one knows where that person is at Homan Square,” Craig Futterman, a professor at the University of Chicago Law School, told The Guardian. “They’re disappeared at that point.”
Lawyers allegedly looking for their clients found it nearly impossible to get to them, and some allege the facility was where detainees were tortured and illegally interrogated. The Guardian analysis covers August 2004 to June 2015. This new report came as a result of The Guardian’s transparency lawsuit.
On top of that, most of those held were black drug offenders, not violent criminals. Richard Dvorak, told The Chicago Tribune that these issues are not just a problem at Homan Square, raising questions about a wider policing problem in the Windy City.
“Everything that was described (in the Guardian story) was something that happens every day,” he told The Chicago Tribune. “I think it’s pretty systemic throughout CPD.”
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