Activists Demand Shut Down of “Black Site” in Chicago
CHICAGO – After a recent ground-breaking report in The Guardiannewspaper exposed an apparent “black site” on the city’s West Side where police beat and hold arrestees incommunicado from attorneys, family and friends, area police accountability activists are demanding that the site be shut down.
The activists will reinforce their demands with a protest dubbed “Shut Down Homan Square,” at 3 PM, this Saturday, February 28 at the facility located at 3379 W. Fillmore Street.
According to The Guardian,
“The Chicago police department operates an off-the-books interrogation compound, rendering Americans unable to be found by family or attorneys while locked inside what lawyers say is the domestic equivalent of a CIA black site… Alleged police practices at Homan Square, according to those familiar with the facility who spoke out to the Guardian after its investigation into Chicago police abuse, include:
· Keeping arrestees out of official booking databases.
· Beating by police, resulting in head wounds.
· Shackling for prolonged periods.
· Denying attorneys access to the “secure” facility.
· Holding people without legal counsel for between 12 and 24 hours, including people as young as 15.
At least one man was found unresponsive in a Homan Square ‘interview room’ and later pronounced dead.”
Activists note that the abuses at Homan Square bear a disturbing resemblance to the some of the abuses made infamous at Guantanamo Bay and other federal government “black sites” around the world.
Among those who witnessed the abuses at Homan Square was Brian Jacob Church, one of the protesters swept up in arrests just prior to the 2012 NATO conference in Chicago. The investigation, prosecution and trial of Church and his co-defendants, “The NATO 3,” was widely decried by civil liberties experts as an exercise in police entrapment.
Chicago police have recently stonewalled repeated efforts to force them to comply with Illinois’s Freedom of Information Act. Activists are demanding that both mayoral candidates and all of the remaining aldermanic candidates publicly commit to shutting down Homan Square and the launching of an unbiased, transparent investigation of the alleged abuses at the site.
In the recent Dunn v. Chicago class action suit, the city paid out $16.5 million for the deliberately poor conditions the CPD held arrestess in, including denial of toilet facilities, denial of access to attorneys, and sleep deprivation. The Homan Square facility is a deliberate attempt to circumvent the new, more humane holding procedures that the city was supposed to have implemented to prevent future abuses.
Please attend the protest tomorrow to demand of all municipal candidates that the abuses stop and that Homan Square be shut down:
3 PM, Saturday, Feb. 28
3379 W. Fillmore Street, Chicago