http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/oct/19/homan-square-chicago-police-disappeared-thousands
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’
Homan Square:
an interactive portrait of detainees at Chicago's police facility
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 aboutHoman
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.
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.”
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.”
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.
“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.
“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.”
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.
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
