Homan Square, Chicago police's off-the-books interrogation warehouse | Hacker News Reader

Homan Square, Chicago police's off-the-books interrogation warehouse

theguardian.com

75 pointsaroch24 comments

This says it all:

  “Not much shakes me in this business – baby murder, sex assault, I’ve done it all,” said David Gaeger, an attorney whose client was taken to Homan Square in 2011 after being arrested for marijuana. “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.”

Chicago PD: Constitution? What constitution?

  According to an analysis of data disclosed to the Guardian in late September, police allowed lawyers access to Homan Square for only 0.94% of the 7,185 arrests logged over nearly 11 years.

Shockingly, the lawyer visit rate at Homan is still 3 times the 'average' rate: "The 2014 citywide total at declared police stations...was 0.3%."

The use of the word "disappeared" is completely inappropriate. This is where people were held for a few hours, not shoved off to a Stalin-esque gulag or summarily executed.

I also don't understand the race baiting conclusion at the end. What percentage of Chicagoans perform crime? Blacks are the poorest group by far and the largest ethnic group in the city, recently pushing out non-Latino whites from number one. If there's a conspiracy to let Whites perform crime without arrest, I'd like some proof other than "wink, wink, nod, nod" race baiting "stats." I pass as White and live in Chicago and the cops have never given me or my friends or family a free pass on anything.

Also Homan Square isn't a "secret black site." The CPD openly acknowledges it. Hell, its where one of the evidence lockers are and they tell people to come on by and pick up their stuff when its no longer needed. What kind of black-site is listed on google maps? It also houses a SWAT group and a ballistics lab. You can pull up into the parking lot anytime you like and walk right in. The CPD just doesn't advertise it explicitly with signs:

"the base of operations for officers working undercover assignments. These men and women dress in plain clothes and work to disrupt gang activity and clear drug markets out of neighborhoods. Advertising their base of operations could put their lives at risk, which is why Homan Square features little signage."

http://abc7chicago.com/news/cpd-releases-fact-sheet-on-homan...

From what I can tell there's been one death there and the CPD claims it was from a heroin overdose. If the CPD was constantly "disappearing" people there would be a lot more evidence than one guy who died who was a known addict. What's the use of setting up a torture and murder center when after decades of use you just get one kill? Its pretty clear the tinfoil and anti-cop crowd control the narrative here.

I'm sure its an unpleasant experience for arrested gang members, but any worse than being in another other facility or city seems questionable. In Illinois you can be held without charges for 48-72 hours, depending on what case law you're looking at. Nor do I see any law about notifying anyone during this period. The credible Homan stories fit this legal framework.

Slightly OT, but The Guardian moved quickly from a place of eminent respect for me (Snowden, etc) to join the majority of the media on the "do not trust" pile for things like you just mentioned. Race baiting, blatant moralizing and pontificating, weasel words and clickbait headlines (people being "disappeared?" get real) in hard news articles, etc.

Fucking report the facts rather than feeding people a narrative. Apparently that's asking too much nowadays.

Journalism is about more than merely reporting facts in bullet point format. Save that for PowerPoint - journalism is about connecting those dots into what the reporter believes is the story.

And that ought to be done as neutrally and factually as possible. If I can see what the journalist's opinion on the matter is by reading their article, they did it wrong. Their job is to tell me what happened and why, not what I should think about it.

Saying that people were "disappeared" as this article does is not journalism, it is demagoguery.

If their facts are correct (and I think we would be remiss in our duty as citizens if we do not give serious attention to every negative thing said about the police at this point until proven otherwise), stating they were "disappeared" is neither journalism or demagoguery, it is fact. Journalism is the article that wraps itself around the word.

But that's nothing more than a half-truth at that point - a lie by omission, since when most people think of the verb "disappeared", they tend to think gulags, people vanishing permanently, etc, like what happened under Stalin.

I know it, you know it, and the writers of a paper like The Guardian certainly know it. Off the books interrogations happening is nothing short of evil on its own - why stretch the truth to imply something else that wasn't happening?

Stalin doesn't own the word 'disappeared'. It's the word you use to describe a policy of taking someone off the street, refusing to acknowledge that they are in custody, denying them access to the outside world and their civil rights. That's what's happening here. What other word would you use to describe it?

I'd agree the connotation is unfortunate but that's simply because 'disappearing' citizens is rarely seen outside of brutal tyrannical dictatorships and in those cases it's usually paired with things that are even worse -- they are sent to gulags and tortured/killed/etc. But the fact that something characteristic of brutal dictatorships is happening in Chicago is exactly what's shocking about the story.

> This is where people were held for a few hours ...

... to a few days. And the purpose of holding them without making it known where they were (which is repugnant) was so that they could sweat the arrestee without the annoyance of a lawyer present and the arrestee understanding his rights.

Depending on who you believe, of course.

It doesn't take some shady secret black site to find cops who will knowingly keep an arrestee in the dark about his/her rights for the purposes of obtaining information. This is completely standard practice at _every_ precinct in America.

"...This is completely standard practice at _every_ precinct in America..."

Wow.

You shouldn't brag about that man. That's not something to be proud of.

That's awful.

If this is so common, why is nothing being done about it? Is there really no accountability at all? Nobody checking to see if cops are playing by the rules?

I liked to believe that despite all the awful news about police behaviour, it was still only a few bad apples. But if it's standard practice at every precinct, are there actually any good cops left?

> Nobody checking to see if cops are playing by the rules?

Other cops.

> The use of the word "disappeared" is completely inappropriate.

Isn't that why they put quotes around the word? As if they're mocking the use of that term?

> This is where people were held for a few hours

you probably just don't get it. People aren't held for 3 hours or until 5pm or until court appearance next morning... They are held for indeterminate period at the discretion of the police and without any communication with the outside world while being pressured into talking with the talking being the ticket out of this indeterminacy. Most people of course break easily in those conditions.

Such exclusion from law is that makes a site a "black" one. The knowledge and understanding by both sides that law doesn't apply here and that either side is aware that the other side is aware about the situation too - that is what makes it so powerful.

What part of "secretly taken and deprived access to the outside world and denied their civil rights for days where the authorities refuse to admit the person is in custody" doesn't describe "disappeared"? I'll give you that in the past it's been used to describe death camps for dissidents in e.g. Latin America but the word is more general than that. We're still allowed to call e.g. waterboarding torture even if teeth are not ripped out and fingernails are not pulled off.

>The use of the word "disappeared" is completely inappropriate.

I agree. Name like Enhanced Secret Displacement Technique is more appropriate.

It would be great if someone on HN is in law enforcment and could explain that perspective. I think it is hard for outsiders, seeing something like this, to understand how people in law enforcment view their relationship with the law.

To be clear: Personally I'm not interested in speculation by people with no expertise; we have had more than enough of that.

Here are some articles from the local Chicago press from the last time this came up:

http://www.wbez.org/news/chicago-polices-so-called-black-sit...

http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/breaking/ct-homan-s...

Not trying to defend CPD here, but the guardian seems to be alone in trying to dramatize this into a story about the Homan Square facility being sort of black ops detention facility.

It was also the subject of The Good Wife season 6 finale, if you like your current events with a side of fiction.

Perhaps, the others don't want to cover it for ulterior motives, such as how could this be going down in your backyard and you know nothing about it?

Big city newspapers are highly dependent on access to police department official information.

> He is among 19 people identified among the 7,185 arrests who turned themselves into police at the warehouse

Who do you contact if you find a typo?

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