In March 2015, the Chicago Police Department (CPD) released a statement denying that law enforcement officers used any physical force against detainees and prisoners at Homan Square, the police department's secret interrogation facility. “The allegation that physical violence is a part of interviews with suspects is unequivocally false, it is offensive, and it is not supported by any facts whatsoever,” stated CPD at the time.
They lied.
According to recently acquired documents, Chicago police punched, hit, slapped, Tasered, and beat at least 14 prisoners at Homan Square.
These documents were obtained by The Guardian "in the course of its transparency lawsuit about the warehouse," and were only released after they "sued under Illinois’ freedom of information law for extensive documentation about the detentions and interrogation practices of the warehouse."
Some of these prisoners were seriously injured, even hospitalized. For others, the violence had lasting physical effects. Many of the stories are extremely disturbing.
Take, for example, the story of Mark Rideaux. From the Guardian:
[In 2001] Rideaux was secured by his left wrist to the wall of a second-floor cell. […] According to the hospitalization case report […] a desk officer “heard a scream” coming from the cell and found Rideaux “unconscious” from a “self-inflicted” injury.
“While in custody, victim, having one hand (left) cuffed to wall with a flex cuff, managed to put another flex cuff around his neck,” an unspecified officer’s report states. Police cut off the cuff and sent him to Mount Sinai hospital for treatment.
The police claim that Rideaux cuffed his own neck, willingly and with only one hand. According to the police, he managed to do this even though he was already cuffed to the wall. It is unclear where he would have even obtained this additional set of cuffs.
Unsurprisingly, Rideaux disputes law enforcement’s account of what happened.
From the Guardian:
In his Homan Square cell, an officer aggressively questioned him about guns and drugs until things got “out of hand”, he remembered.
“I did not recall what I said that made him so up-set, but thats when he [put] the Flex-Cuff around my neck,” Rideaux wrote to the Guardian from prison, where he is serving a narcotics sentence. [...]
“All I remember is waking up on the floor of the cell. and them saying that I try to kill myself. I was taken to the hospital and was told it would be in my best interest to go along with the story! So being afraid, I did what I was told.”
This is just one example of many where police employed excessive force against detainees. Here’s the 2013 story of Dwand Ivery.
[A]s police were arresting 22-year-old Dwand Ivery on a drug-distribution charge, one officer suspected Ivery had swallowed the illicit evidence. His response was to choke Ivery into spitting out “whatever it was he believed I ingested," Ivery recalled in a letter to the Guardian from prison, with the officer’s partner, the driver of their vehicle, urging him to stop, "telling him 'not outside'."
As they drove to Homan Square, the officer, still convinced he could get Ivery to spit out drugs, used a metal object "in the shape of a short ink pen" as a tongue depressor "while applying pressure to my stomach with his left elbow." He pressed down on the back of Ivery’s neck, effectively folding him over. "He held my head in that position until we reached the garage of Homan Square police station," Ivery wrote, and despite his vomiting, "no drugs was never recovered."
Ivery suffered from asthma, and was having trouble breathing because of all the stomach, neck, and throat pressure. He demanded to be taken to the hospital but instead he was put into what he describes as a cage.
From his "cage", Ivery was moved into an interrogation room and cuffed to a metal bench. When the officers told him to stretch his legs straight out so they could remove his shoes, Ivery again refused and demanded medical attention. According to Ivery’s account, the police turned violent.
"I was struck with multiple blows with open and closed fist by two officers. My shoes was eventually removed and they began to strike me in my head and face area with those as well. I felt my face start to swell and deform instantly. This lasted for multiple minutes," he wrote, until a plainclothes officer, hearing the commotion, went over to the interrogation room and told the cops Ivery had had enough.
Ivery was then left alone for hours, never able to contact a lawyer or let anyone know where he was. They told him that they would release him if he would give them the name of a "house that I knew had drugs and or guns.” When he said he didn’t know of any, they drove him to the police station for booking. But his facial injuries were so bad that the cops would not even accept him for booking, instead requiring him to get the medical attention he had been begging for for hours.
The beating “leaves me with a deformed face, lack of vision in my left eye and multiple mental health problems that I now have to be medicated for, including anxiety and depression,” Ivery wrote to the Guardian. “That situation changed my life in a number of different ways.”
The incident was reviewed by a "senior official" but, unsurprisingly, they did not find Ivery’s injuries to be problematic. On Ivery's Tactical Response Report, the official concluded that the "the officers used reasonable force to effect the lawful arrest of the assailant/suspect" and the force used was "in compliance with department procedures and directives." The reviewing officer did not interview Ivery.
This is unsurprising— the Guardian found that, "In all cases … the reviews found the use of force to be justified, even when the officers did not interview the victims."
Homan Square made headlines last year when it was discovered that law enforcement had detained at least 7,000 people there since 2004. Homan Square is not a jail nor a police station. One attorney described it as "'an intelligence gathering place' akin to a CIA 'black site.'" From Mother Jones:
On the basis of internal Chicago police records, [the Guardian] reported in February that officers had brought thousands of detainees (mostly black, often low-level drug offenders) to Homan Square, where they were essentially "disappeared"—held and questioned without access to attorneys or phone calls. Of 7,185 people detained there since 2004, just 68 had access to a lawyer or were able to make their whereabouts known to family or friends—about 65 percent of the detentions took place after May 16, 2011, when Emanuel took office.
Those cases were traceable only because the interrogations resulted in an arrest[.] Nobody knows how many more people were detained for a time and then released. Homan Square keeps no booking records, according to a sworn deposition of a police researcher in September.
Lawyers told [the Guardian] that the process of locating a client there could be a nightmare—attorneys struggle even to find a phone number for the facility and are routinely turned away when they show up in person. One lawyer said the site was "guarded like a military installation."
Of the 7,000 known Homan Square detainees, at least 6,000 were black.
There have been countless reports of physical violence in the facility. From Mother Jones:
Detainees have claimed that officers tried to turn them into informants, threatened them (and their families) with violence and false charges, and in one case even sodomized a man with a metal object (possibly the barrel of a handgun) after he refused to help officers buy drugs as part of a sting operation.
The CPD continues to deny that such abuse occurred. The department has released a statement In response to The Guardian’s newly acquired documents.
“The Chicago Police Department takes allegations of excessive force very seriously. In Chicago, all use-of-force cases require extensive documentation using the tactical response report. These cases are then vigorously investigated by an external, civilian-led agency known as the Chicago Independent Police Review Authority (IPRA). We stand behind our initial statement and our unwavering commitment to the highest levels of accountability and professional standards for our officers.”
In the coming days, The Guardian will continue to release information about these documents— including details regarding the suspicious death of one detainee and the possible law enforcement cover-up.
Discuss below.