Homan Square revealed: how Chicago police
'disappeared' 7,000 people
Exclusive:
Guardian lawsuit exposes fullest scale yet of detentions at off-the-books
interrogation warehouse, while attorneys describe find-your-client chase across
Chicago as ‘something from a Bond movie’
Police “disappeared” more than 7,000
people at an off-the-books interrogation warehouse in Chicago, nearly twice as
many detentions as previously
disclosed, the Guardian can now reveal.
Homan Square: an interactive portrait of
detainees at Chicago's police facility
Read more
From August 2004 to June 2015, nearly
6,000 of those held at the facility were black, which represents more than
twice the proportion of the city’s population. But only 68 of those held were
allowed access to attorneys or a public notice of their whereabouts, internal
police records show.
The new disclosures, the result of an
ongoing Guardian transparency lawsuit and investigation, provide the most
detailed, full-scale portrait yet of the truth about Homan Square, a
secretive facility that Chicago police have described as little more than a
low-level narcotics crime outpost where the mayor has said police “follow all
the rules”.
The police portrayals contrast sharply
with those of Homan Square detainees and their lawyers, who insist that “if
this could happen to someone, it could happen to anyone”. A 30-year-old man
named Jose, for example, was one of the few detainees with an attorney present
when he surrendered to police. He said officers at the warehouse questioned him
even after his lawyer specifically told them he would not speak.
“The Fillmore and Homan boys,” Jose
said, referring to police and the facility’s cross streets, “don’t play by the
rules.”
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. That
percentage aligns with Chicago
police’s broader practice of providing minimal access to attorneys during the
crucial early interrogation stage, when an arrestee’s constitutional rights
against self-incrimination are most vulnerable.
But Homan Square is unlike Chicago
police precinct houses, according to lawyers who described a “find-your-client
game” and experts who reviewed data from the latest tranche of arrestee records
obtained by the Guardian.
That place was and is scary. There's
nothing about it that resembles a police station
Attorney David Gaeger
“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.”
The narcotics, vice and anti-gang units
operating out of Homan Square, on Chicago’s west side, take arrestees to the
nondescript warehouse from all over the city: police data obtained by the
Guardian and mapped against the city grid show that 53% of disclosed arrestees
come from more than 2.5 miles away from the warehouse. No contemporaneous
public record of someone’s presence at Homan Square is known to exist.
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Nor are any booking records generated
at Homan Square, as confirmed by a sworn deposition of a police researcher in
late September, further preventing relatives or attorneys from finding someone
taken there.
“The reality is, no one knows where
that person is at Homan Square,” said Craig Futterman, a professor at the
University of Chicago Law School who studies policing. “They’re disappeared at
that point.”
A Chicago police spokesman did not
respond to a list of questions for this article, including why the department
had doubled its initial arrest disclosures without an explanation for the lag.
“If lawyers have a client detained at Homan Square, just like any other
facility, they are allowed to speak to and visit them,” the police claimed in a
February statement.
Numbers are ‘hard to believe’
Twenty-two people have told the
Guardian that Chicago police kept them at Homan Square for hours and even days.
They describe pressure from officers to become informants, and all but two –
both white – have said the police denied them phone calls to alert relatives or
attorneys of their whereabouts.
Their accounts point to violations of police
directives,
which say police must “complete the booking process” regardless of their
interest in interrogating a suspect and must also “allow the arrestee to make a
reasonable number of telephone calls to an attorney, family member or friend”,
usually within “the first hour” of detention.
The most recent disclosure of Homan
Square data provides the scale behind those accounts: the demographic trends
within the 7,185 disclosed arrests at the warehouse are now far more vast than
what the Guardian reported in August after launching the transparency lawsuit
– but are consistently disproportionate in terms of race and constitutional
access to legal counsel.
- 82.2% of people detained at Homan Square were black, compared with 32.9% of the Chicago population.
- 11.8% of detainees in the Homan Square logs were Hispanic, compared with 28.9% of the population.
- 5.5% of the detainees were white, compared with 31.7% of the population.
- Of the 68 people who Chicago police claim had access to counsel at Homan Square, however, 45% were black, 26% were Hispanic and another 26% were white.
“Operating a massive, red-brick
warehouse between two of the most crime-filled areas in the city of Chicago,
equipped with floodlights, cameras, razor-wire – this near-paramilitary wing of
the government that we’ve created, I would say that people who live close to it
know what purpose it serves the most,” said the attorney Gaeger. “The
demographics that surround it speak for themselves.”
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Despite the lack of booking and minimal
attorney access at Homan Square, it is not a facility for detaining and
interrogating the most violent of Chicago’s criminals. Drug possession charges
were eventually levied in 5,386 of the disclosed Homan Square arrests, or
74.9%; heroin accounted for 35.4% of those, with marijuana next at 22.3%.
The facility’s use by police has
intensified in recent years. Nearly 65% of documented Homan Square arrests
since August 2004 took place in the five years since Rahm Emanuel, formerly
Barack Obama’s top aide, became mayor. (The Guardian has filed a Foia request
with Emanuel’s office to disclose the extent of its involvement in Homan
Square.)
The 68 documented attorney visits are
actually slightly higher, statistically speaking, than the extremely minimal
legal access Chicago police provide suspects in custody during the initial
stages of their arrest. The 2014 citywide total at declared police stations,
according to First Defense Legal Aid, was 0.3%.
On face value, the lawyer visit rate at Homan Square, according to the newly
disclosed documents, was 0.9% over nearly 11 years.
But those documents do not tell the
entire story of Homan Square. Chicago police have not disclosed any figures at
all on people who were detained at Homan Square but never ultimately charged.
Nor has it released any information about detentions or arrests before
September 2004, claiming that information is burdensome to produce because it
is not digital. (Chicago purchased the warehouse in 1995.)
“It’s hard to believe that 7,185
arrests is an accurate number of arrestees at Homan Square,” said the
University of Chicago’s Futterman. “Even if it were true that less than 1% of
Homan arrestees were given access to counsel, that would be abhorrent in and of
itself.”
‘Try finding a phone number for Homan’
Arrestees
often are not processed at the Homan Square facility, in apparent violation of
Chicago police directives. Photograph: The Guardian
Chicago attorneys say they are not
routinely turned away from police precinct houses, as they are at Homan Square.
The warehouse is also unique in not generating public records of someone’s
detention there, permitting police to effectively hide detainees from their
attorneys.
“Try finding a phone number for Homan
to see if anyone’s there. You can’t, ever,” said Gaeger. “If you’re laboring
under the assumption that your client’s at Homan, there really isn’t much you
can do as a lawyer. You’re shut out. It’s guarded like a military
installation.”
The difficulty lawyers have in finding
phone numbers for Homan Square mirrors the difficulties that arrestees at the
warehouse have in making phone calls to the outside world. Futterman called the
lack of phone access at Homan Square a critical problem.
Booking isn’t happening or is happening
sporadically and inconsistently, which leads to the whole find-your-client game
Craig Futterman, University of
Chicago Law School
“They’re not given access to phones,
and the CPD’s admitted this, until they get to lockup – but there’s no lockup
at Homan Square,” he said. “How do you contact a lawyer? It’s not telepathy.
“Often,” Futterman continued,
“prisoners aren’t entered into the central booking system until they’re being
processed – which doesn’t occur at Homan Square. They’re supposed to begin that
processing right away, under
CPD procedures, and at Homan Square the reality is, that isn’t happening or
is happening sporadically and inconsistently, which leads to the whole
find-your-client game.”
Additionally, some of those who Chicago
police listed as receiving lawyer visits at Homan Square disputed the accounts
or said the access provided was superficial.
According to police, when they took a
woman the Guardian will identify as Chevoughn to Homan Square in May 2007
regarding a theft, they allowed her attorney to see her. Chevoughn says that
never happened.
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“I was there a very long time, maybe
eight to 10 hours,” said Chevoughn, who remembered being “petrified”,
particularly as police questioned her in what she calls a “cage”.
“I went to Harrison and Kedzie,”
Chevoughn said, referring to the cross streets of central booking. “That’s
where I slept. It’s where they did fingerprinting, all that crap. That’s when
my attorney came.”
Police arrested another man, whom the
Guardian will call Anthony, in 2006 on charges of starting a garbage fire, and
moved him to Homan Square. Police identified him as receiving an attorney
there. But Anthony told the Guardian: “That’s not true.”
Lawyer Rajeev Bajaj was allowed into
Homan Square to see one of his clients in 2006. Police stopped Bajaj from
entering for approximately an hour, and by the time they let him in he saw “the
secretive nature” of officers and prosecutors there – exactly what he visited
the warehouse to stop them from doing.
“When I got there, there were two prosecutors
questioning, knowing fully that I was down there to see him,” Bajaj said. “When
I walked in, they seriously walked away, acting like they weren’t speaking to
him or anything. It’s typical Chicago police, typical Homan Square, typical
Cook County prosecutors’ office.”
‘They squeeze people. That’s what they do’
Chicago sued for 'unconstitutional and
torturous' Homan Square police abuse
Read more
Jose, a 30-year-old Chicagoan whose
last name the Guardian agreed not to publish, did not have access to his
attorney at Homan Square. He is among 19 people identified among the 7,185
arrests who turned themselves into police at the warehouse – and whose access
to a lawyer ended inside.
According to court and police documents
from Jose’s case, an anonymous informant told officers a man nicknamed “Chuie”
sold him marijuana from the address where Jose lived. (Not only did the search
warrant not name Jose, it described a taller man.) Police showed up at his
house in force in February 2013, guns drawn.
Jose wasn’t home. But his wife and
10-year-old daughter were, as well as his daughter’s friend, who had come over
to work on a school project.
Police took a substantial amount of
marijuana and what Jose said was about $10,000 in cash. The arrest report
listed the cash at $4,670. Jose said he never got his money back.
After consulting with his attorney,
Jose and lawyer Nick Albukerk traveled to Homan Square the following month.
Albukerk said he advised officers that Jose was invoking his rights against
self-incrimination and was not to be questioned. But the lawyer did not enter
Homan Square as his client was led inside and placed in a room by himself.
That's what they do, man: they get
people who don't know their rights
Jose
According to the police report, it was
10pm. Jose took a Xanax for his nerves. He began to nod off, until he heard
banging on the door and a demand to “get up”.
“Are you going to help yourself?” Jose
remembered the officer telling him.
“What do you mean, help myself? ‘Are
you going to talk to me?’ ‘Nah, my lawyer was just here. You could have just
said this in front of my lawyer. I know my rights’ … He wasn’t trying to hear
it. He was just blabbing away, like ‘Oh, you think you’re a smart-ass,’ this
and that.
“That’s what they do, man: they get
people who don’t know their rights,” Jose continued. “That’s probably how they
came upon me and my house – probably someone ended up talking to them and they
dry-snitched on me. All they knew was that I lived there.
“They squeeze people, and then they go
get somebody else. That’s what they do.”
Additional
reporting by Zach Stafford and Phillipp Batta in Chicago and the Guardian US
interactive team
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