Chicagoans Detail Abusive Confinement Inside Police 'Black Site'

By Spencer Ackerman, Guardian UK

28 February 15

 

Chicago man says he was confined for three days – shackled, interrogated and fed only twice, his whereabouts unknown – inside the police “black site” at the epicentre of public outcry over allegations of abuse said to focus on minority citizens.

Four black Chicagoans have now come forward to the Guardian detailing off-the-books ordeals at the facility, including another who describes being detained in “a big cage” with his wrists cuffed to a bench so he couldn’t move.

The Guardian has now interviewed six people about their detention at the Homan Square police warehouse. With striking consistency, all have described extensive detentions without benefit of legal counsel or public notice of where they were.

The first-hand accounts of two white protesters who “disappeared” at the police warehouse in 2012 set off political and civil-rights outrage this week, and multiple protests have now been scheduled by organizers including the Black Lives Matter movement.

Brock Terry, 31, says police took him to Homan Square in 2011, after finding him with five and a half pounds of marijuana, and describes being held for three entire days without public notice, booking or a lawyer.

“I sat in that place for three days, man – with no talking, no calls to nobody,” Terry told the Guardian on Friday. His friends and family could not find him: “They call police stations, I’m not there, I’m not there.”

“I was kept there. I didn’t speak to a lawyer or anything,” he continued. “I didn’t interact with nobody for three days. And then when I do see the light of day, I go straight to another police station, go straight there to county and be processed.”

Terry detailed being handcuffed in one room at Homan Square by one wrist to a “little circular thing behind the bench”, echoing the accounts of the two Nato protesters interviewed by the Guardian, though Terry said he did not have his ankles cuffed together.

Three other men, Kory Wright, Deandre Hutcherson and David Smith, have also told the Guardian they were held in 2006 inside Homan Square, where they say they were handcuffed by both wrists with their arms spread. Hutcherson says he was punched in the face while in this position, before an officer stepped on his groin “like he was putting a cigarette out”.

Another lawyer has told the Guardian that in early 2014, police told him that his client – another young black man – was not at Homan Square, even though he was.

“What they did that night, by denying my 19-year-old client access to his attorney was unconstitutional, clearly,” said Cliff Nellis, an attorney with the Lawndale Christian Legal Center, located near Homan Square on Chicago’s west side.

The Chicago police did not respond to questions for this story. Mayor Rahm Emanuel, currently facing a heated runoff for re-election, said on Thursday night it was “not true” that the police maintain a facility lawyers have compared to a CIA “black site”.

Activists are planning a “Shut Down Homan Square” protest on Saturday and a demonstration for reparations for longstanding victims of Chicago police torture on Monday. Representatives from Black Lives Matter Chicago said they were helping to organize and promote the Monday action. Several Chicago local and national politicians are calling for investigations, including from the US justice department, into allegations of police misconduct at the warehouse.

While Terry said that he did not see anyone else while confined at Homan in 2011, he said he heard people yelling “no, no, no” and “stop”. He remembered seeing chain-link “cages”, of the sort previously described to the Guardian by attorneys and former police superintendent Richard Brzeczek. They reminded him of dog kennels, he said.

“They got kennels – like, for people,” Terry told the Guardian. “I didn’t really want to believe that, but it is the truth.”

He continued: “I never saw anyone, but I know something else is going on. You don’t want to be in that kind of situation, so you gotta be quiet about it, so you don’t go down that route.”

While shackled and interrogated over the next three days, police fed Terry only twice, he said, with baloney sandwiches and juice. He got to use the bathroom “hardly ever, but I did use it.”

“Every day they came to ask some questions. Am I in a gang? Who am I with? Who run this? Who run that? Give them a gun and they’ll let me go,” Terry said. “That was pretty much the main thing: give them a gun and they’ll let me go. But I didn’t produce a gun.”

Had Terry found them a gun, he said, his ordeal with police might never end: “The thing about it is, when they say give them a gun, they let you go, but it’s like long invisible string tied to your ass. They definitely gonna come back to interrogate you to get another gun, or ask you about this crime, give them some information about this crime.”

‘It’s gonna get a little hot up in here’: three friends, from video games to handcuffs

Wright, Hutcherson and Smith were also taken to Homan Square. Their ordeal, first reported by Juan Thompson of the Intercept, took place five years earlier. Wright recalled agreeing to break a $50 bill for a woman in North Lawndale who said she wanted to buy drugs but turned out to be an undercover police officer.

Police, wearing plain clothes, then burst inside Smith’s home and apprehended him and Hutcherson, 19, who had been playing video games in the basement. Smith, the oldest and Wright’s cousin, was 29. It was Wright’s 21st birthday. Both men told the Guardian they were neither booked, read their rights nor permitted a phone call.

Taken to separate rooms, each independently described being shackled to a bar. While the anti-Nato demonstrators and Terry were cuffed by one wrist to a bar behind a bench, Hutcherson and Wright say they were cuffed, with their arms spread out, to the bar by both wrists.

“They had me handcuffed – both hands stretched-out,” Wright told the Guardian. “I was stretched out like I’m being crucified.”

The position left Hutcherson defenseless when an officer he said grew frustrated with interrogating him and punched him two or three times in the face.

“He takes his foot and steps on my groin, like he was putting out a cigarette or something, with his toe,” Hutcherson told the Guardian. Before leaving, the officer said, “it’s gonna get a little hot up in here,’” Hutcherson remembered. The officer closed the door and soon Hutcherson began sweltering from the heat in the stifling room.

Wright said he didn’t think to ask for a lawyer: “My head was spinning, it was just like a bad dream.” Hutcherson said that after police denied him a phone call, he didn’t see the point in asking.

Wright added that he was not physically harmed, and made up stories to be set free when asked about random “murders and robberies.” Instead, he was taken to a nearby police station and booked on a drug charge. Wright would later be acquitted in a bench trial.

Smith, whose story has not previously been reported, said the police saw him as uncooperative. They moved him to what he called “a big cage”.

“They had my wrists taken together to a steel post on a bench,” Smith told the Guardian on Friday.

“So I couldn’t move, I couldn’t lift up. I had to lie sideways like that just to try to get some sleep, like that, for hours.”

Smith estimates he was at Homan Square without a lawyer or booking for “six, seven hours”. He said he was later taken to a nearby police station and booked on a drug-delivery charge, on which he was ultimately acquitted.

‘It’s used to interrogate poor brown and black young men’: more pressure, from Homan to the top

‘That’s not true,’ Mayor Rahm Emanuel said on Thursday night when pressed on allegations
of police abuse at Homan Square on Chicago’s west side. ‘We follow all the rules.’
(photo: Philipp Batta/Guardian)

More recently, around February 2014, Nellis said he got a tip that his client – 19 years old, black and from the west side of Chicago – had been taken to Homan Square in connection with a drug investigation. When he got to the warehouse on Homan and Fillmore, he asked a woman “wearing a police uniform” what the unfamiliar building was.

“What I recall her saying is, ‘Oh, I don’t know what this is,” and walked off,” Nellis said. Another attempt at flagging down officers in the Homan Square docking bay, during which he identified himself as a lawyer seeking to see his client, resulted in them telling Nellis: “This isn’t a police station, we don’t hold people here.”

Nellis dialed a contact he declined to identify and complained, saying he knew his client was inside Homan Square. About ten minutes later, an officer emerged to let him in. Nellis’ client – whom he declined to name, citing ongoing legal issues – was in handcuffs and had been interrogated. Nellis believes the youth had been in custody for a “few hours”.

“I know many other attorneys through First Defense Legal Aid who have tried to get in there and been denied numerous times,” Nellis said.

In a statement issued to the Guardian and other news outlets on Tuesday, Chicago police denied the Guardian’s reporting, without giving specifics, and insisted that Homan Square is no different than any other police facility, albeit somewhat more sensitive given the presence of undercover units. The department, which has not denied interrogating suspects at Homan Square, did not respond to questions from the Guardian sent on Thursday about Terry, Wright and Hutcherson.

“This isn’t just a facility that’s used to detain people for political protests,” said Chicago attorney Anthony Hill. “It’s used to interrogate poor brown and black young men. That’s that the majority of abuse at the Homan Square facility on a daily basis.”

Flint Taylor, a Chicago attorney who has pursued legal reprisals against police abuse for decades, said he held out little hope that federal inquiries would actually proceed.

“Over the last 25 years, we have repeatedly brought the justice department and the US attorney powerful evidence of systemic police torture, repeater cops running wild without discipline or supervision, and a myriad of other patterns of outrageous police misconduct,” Taylor said.

“When Barack Obama was an Illinois state senator, he assiduously avoided any acknowledgement of, or involvement in, the fight against police torture, as did then Congressman Rahm Emanuel, who later became Obama’s chief of staff. Hence both Chicago and national politics, past and present, make me very skeptical that the justice department will investigate Mayor Emanuel’s cops now.”

The justice department has declined comment on Homan Square. Emanuel’s office has refused multiple requests for comment from the Guardian this week, referring a reporter to the police department statement.

When police finally released Hutcherson in 2006 – after about three or four hours, he said, that saw him punched in the face, stomped in the groin and kept in a baking room – he said he sprinted out of the warehouse in fear.

“I take off running, you know, because I want to get out of the situation. I’m 19, I never been arrested, no record, nothing,” he said.

“I’ll never forget: the officer that let me out, he’s like, ‘Stop running, asshole, before you pass out.’ And I just paid him no mind, just kept running straight down Homan.”