In the wake of last week’s revelations about Homan Square, the off-the-books “black site” where Chicago PD disappear prisoners for violent, aggressive interrogation, four of the site’s victims have come forward to describe the highly racialized human rights abuses at the secret site.
The initial report on Homan Square focused on the experience of two white anti-Nato protesters who were hidden at Homan Square as a political reprisal. But the typical Homan Square victim is black, young and male — also the archetype of the victims of America’s world-beating incarceration system overall. They were held for multi-day stints while bound, brutalized and starved.
“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”.
‘I sat in that place for three days, man’: Chicagoans detail abusive confinement inside police ‘black site’ [Spencer Ackerman/The Guardian]
(Thanks, TrollsOpinion!)