In 2015, news broke that Chicago police had been detaining people in an “off-the-books interrogation warehouse,” where only half of their arrests were actually reported.
The warehouse is called Homan Square. And according to attorneys, advocates, and victims, it might be one of the scariest places in the country. Why?
Detainees said they were handcuffed and held in rooms for days at a time without food, water, or access to legal counsel. Many also cited being sexually violated, beaten up with phone books, and electrocuted! But how did they get there in the first place?
Most people ended up at Homan Square for drug possession, like marijuana. Many also landed there for minor cases, like driving without a seatbelt! And guess what? 82.2% of detainees were Black.
It’s impossible to know where many of the detainees are now. There’s no public record! So last summer, protestors called for the facility to be shut down. But the Chicago Police Department pushed back, saying that Homan Square is “fully functioning.”
We need to expose the truth about these police departments. More often than not, what goes on in there is more heinous than we think. As weak police “reforms” pass, we cannot ignore the violence of a system that continues to defend atrocities like what’s happened at Homan Square.