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Chicago Police Held Thousands Of Americans Inside secret Prison [picture]
After filing a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit against the Chicago Police Department (CPD), The Guardian has discovered over 3,600 people have been detained at a secure facility known as Homan Square. Notorious for allegedly denying access to defense attorneys and committing human rights abuses, the officers at this CIA-style black site have been accused of coercing confessions, committing torture, and shackling detainees for prolonged periods. Although the CPD has denied these accusations, the department has been marred with a history of abuse and corruption.
On February 24, The Guardian exposed a police detention facility in Chicago where arrestees were kept out of official booking databases, denied legal representation, and endured hours of physical and psychological abuse. After the CPD ignored several FOIA requests regarding their facility at Homan Square, The Guardian filed a lawsuit against the department in April requesting further information, including the number of people detained at Homan Square and video evidence of interrogations at the site.
The CPD has recently revealed that at least 3,621 people have been detained at Homan Square for crimes ranging from drinking in public to murder. Although Chicago’s population is 33% black and 32% white according to the 2010 U.S. census, over 82% of the disclosed Homan Square arrests consist of black residents. Only 8.5% of the detainees were white, while 6.7% were Hispanic.
“When I was a detective, occasionally I would arrest a white person,” recalled Lorenzo Davis, a former police detective who commanded a unit at Homan Square, “and the white detectives would be overly interested in why I was arresting someone white.”
According to the CPD, only three arrestees received visits from their lawyers between September 2004 and July 2015. In its investigation, The Guardian documented an additional eight times that attorneys were present at Homan Square. In four instances, lawyers accompanied their clients to Homan to turn themselves in to authorities. Two lawyers were allowed interviews with their clients, while in at least two other cases, attorneys assert that they were refused access to their clients. SOURCE
