But Rahm Emanuel is one of us, man! He calls people bad names!
Charles Pierce had some commentary about how This Isn't America in which he detailed the fact that Chicago PD have been doing this for over a century. I hate to break it to you, Charlie...
I'll believe it when it shows up on The Good Wife.
On that CPD/Gitmo story, I initially misread it as bringing Gitmo techniques to the mean streets of Chicago. When I realized it went the other way, I felt, if possible, more sickened.
4: The writers are surely on it already. It'll be where Lemond Bishop is detained after Kalinda is found dead, even though the real murderer is Cary Agos or the FBI chick or Diane's gun-expert husband.
Interesting. Ackerman presented a bit of this on Maddow last night, but it didn't touch on the Homan site - just about Zuley and what he did at Guantanamo and how it paralleled with what he likely did to individual suspects in Chicago.
The less-than-overly-concerned with the Constitution attitudes of the Chicago Police Department seems to have seeped into pop culture. There was a cross-over episode of Law and Order SVU with Chicago P.D. once. Detective Benson kept having to rein in the police sargent from Chicago. I then watched a regular episode of Chicago P.D. and thought that they made Detective Stabler's look like a timid cat.
Don't even get me started...
Wait, how come we don't have one of these? This is bullshit.
I was surprised that they have an entire building for this. I always figured they'd just use their normal facilities for this. If nothing else, it seems a lot easier to deny. Whoops. We just forgot to check that guy in!
There's local/regional variations in booking procedures. Our interview rooms are at our precinct/headquarters but that's not where people are booked into the system for jail. That's done at the actual jail, a county run facility. If someone is at our building being interviewed there's nowhere to look that up. But once you're booked into jail then that's public information that can be seen on the jail's website.
12: So if someone's undergoing a long interrogation first thing nobody at the station will be able to tell friends/family whether they're even in custody or not?
13: We might let someone know where they're at on their behalf but we're probably not going to let them do the talking. And we're not required to do even that. None of this overrides Miranda or anything. If you demand a lawyer questioning has to stop. But if your demand is to be allowed to call your brother or whatever you might get told to pound sand.
Jerome Finnigan and some special operations squad that are now being investigated for a decade's worth of robberies and killings of people who were guilty-ish is more recent than Jon Burge. Those are just the guys who got caught.
Sure would be complicated to set up some kind of reporting system that counted people who died in custody.
This thread reminds me it might be time for a drunken re-watching of The Shield.
Does "I want to call a lawyer" automatically equal "I want a lawyer to represent me" or does it have to be the magic words? Maybe you want to call a lawyer to discuss the future of legal education in this country, it doesn't mean you want representation during questioning.
Similarly, the police can just introduce to someone called Miranda.
So is the entire article bullshit, gswift? The Chicago police did not do these things?
Or are specific details of it no big deal?
I have to admit that it doesn't sound like a huge story to me either. Individual cases of brutality are a big deal, but the pattern described is of it being hard or impossible to locate and contact arrestees for periods of hours rather than days after arrest. That's not good, but not shocking -- I would have guessed that it might take that long to find people after arrest before I read the story.
Okay, yes, let's concede that being held for 10 or 15 or 20 hours without being booked is no big deal.
These prisoners also asked for lawyers and were denied access to their lawyers. They were also (apparently) tortured into false confessions.
21.2: Chicago PD is well known for torturing suspects, not that it's less wrong. In the 90s, there were enough (!) capital cases exonerated (false confessions) that the governor ordered a moratorium on executions. In 2003, IL passed a law requiring videotaped interrogations, but only for murders, I think. In 2013, Quinn extended the law to other serious, violent crimes. Chicago PD opposed both measures strongly. I'm glad to see this story get press, but at some point, I'm honestly confused -- is this really better or easier than just doing things right?
Well, what exactly is the story? "Honan Square" is the hook the story hangs on -- arrestees disappear there and can't be contacted for hours. That sounds, to me, like not a huge deal.
Then you've got one story where Church alleges that he was interrogated without a lawyer. I'm sure that happened, and it is very wrong and very important, and there should be a disciplinary response to it, because it is a vitally important constitutional right. But it's not a surprising story at all; it's run of the mill police misconduct.
I'm not saying the story describes acceptable police behavior, but none of it seems particularly surprising to me either.
When the G20 was in town, they got Chicago police to assist. They managed to distinguish themselves.
Huh, it seems incredibly frightening to me that there is a specific building we take you to in order to break any and all rules we want. "This is the times-out building! Rules don't apply here!" It seems like the premise of a horror movie - once you're going somewhere out-of-bounds, all of a sudden you're flooded with the terror that absolutely anything could happen.
I assume that's why they have a specific building.
Like the whole building is bad cop?
Which building gets to be comic relief?
Well, that's how the story is written -- I think that's the effect the writer was going for -- but I don't think it cashes out. I mean, is the idea that everyplace else in the Chicago PD system, there's no chance of police brutality and no one ever gets kept away from their lawyer? The claim is that when it's hard to find an arrestee for hours, they're probably at Honan Square. And it seems reasonably likely that the Honan Square location is systematically slower to provide access to people than than the rest of the system, or there wouldn't be any story at all. But I don't think the story backs up the idea that "When you're in Chicago PD custody, you're perfectly safe and everything's okay, unless they send you to Honan Square, where all bets are off."
I believe that Homan is the hook because it's analogized to CIA "black sites". And the thing is, while all analogies are terrible, this one isn't the worst, because the facility seems to be set up precisely to avoid accountability.
Practices that are reasonable for reasonable actors are not (necessarily) reasonable for known bad actors, and "known bad actor" clearly describes the CPD. So yeah, gswift's enlightened PD, with its decently respectful attitude towards suspects and non-hardass chief, can be trusted with non-booked suspects for hours at a time. But the CPD? In a place with no outside people at all? No.
It's not as if having the US Army run prisons in Iraq was inherently crazy. But once Abu Ghraib became known, you'd be a fool to say, "Well, of course the Army will be detaining Iraqis, and not publicizing the fact, so what's the big deal with a few black sites?"
I mean, is the idea that everyplace else in the Chicago PD system, there's no chance of police brutality and no one ever gets kept away from their lawyer?
No? But it reminds me of a frat house hazing thing where they take you to the middle of the woods, even though plenty of bullshit takes place in the basement of the frat house.
The secret building creates enormous psychological fear that 1) you can stay there as long as they want to keep you there, and 2) no one knows where you are. If you're being beaten up in police HQ, you at least know if your lawyer is supposed to show up at 4 pm the next day, or that your mom will call looking for you when you don't pick up your kid, etc.
Well, what exactly is the story? "Honan Square" is the hook the story hangs on -- arrestees disappear there and can't be contacted for hours. That sounds, to me, like not a huge deal.Well, what exactly is the story? "Honan Square" is the hook the story hangs on -- arrestees disappear there and can't be contacted for hours. That sounds, to me, like not a huge deal.
On its own, maybe not, but isn't it a red flag that no outsiders, including lawyers or press, are normally allowed in? How is that different from what a routinely torturing government would do to keep everything under wraps and off the books?
Even if booking is often not prompt in practice, there's a reason it has to be done as a public record. Having that kind of building (especially with the specific incidents and what we know about the CPD) has the whiff of institutionalizing abuses that otherwise might be more sporadic.
because the facility seems to be set up precisely to avoid accountability.
Again, all the specific anecdotes end up with people getting access to their lawyers in less than a day. I'm really not saying that's an acceptable timelag, but if you heard that timelag described in a more neutrally written story, would your mind go straight to CIA black sites?
"When you're in Chicago PD custody, you're perfectly safe and everything's okay, unless they send you to Honan Square, where all bets are off."
You don't think abuse is more likely in a facility that is closed to the public, as opposed to a facility where the public walks in at all hours to interact with police in their "serve and protect" role? I don't know if this is hopelessly naive or nihilistically cynical.
Also, if they denied a white guy a lawyer...
On its own, maybe not, but isn't it a red flag that no outsiders, including lawyers or press, are normally allowed in?
That is specifically denied by the Chicago PD in the story, and all actual anecdotes in the story culminate with lawyers being allowed in.
Again, all the specific anecdotes end up with people getting access to their lawyers in less than a day.
Yes, but obviously the detainees don't know this. They're under the impression that they could be there until they cooperate. Perhaps it generally takes only a few hours for people to cave.
I'm mostly pushing back because the story is really light on specifics. Allegations from unnamed lawyers with unnamed clients saying that they weren't allowed in under unspecified circumstances, specific stories that don't actually sound that shocking to me, and clear statements from the Chicago PD that the rules there are the same as anyplace else.
I mean, being in police custody at all has to be terrifying: unless you're experienced you don't know what the rules are are or what's likely to happen next. But the story doesn't say that people in Honan Square were being terrorized by being told that "No one knows where you are, we can do anything to you."
clear statements from the Chicago PD that the rules there are the same as anyplace else
Well, I must clearly be wrong then.
Oh christ. CPD has been killing people in custody for decades-- scandal after scandal with particular sloppy and brutal cops getting caught and given a slap on the wrist a decade after getting shut down. Jon Burge, Jerome Finnigan, eg, and that leaves aside the ordinary policement who cripple people in public places for questioning their orders or not serving drinks quickly enough. What do you think these guys do when they get to lock the door?
Seriously, there's no system in place to log how many people are injured or killed in custody. The fact that a handful of people well-connected enough to have persistent attorneys eventually got to see their attorney is not an exoneration. The more basic question, which cannot be answered, is how many people got hurt here. Ideally, how many got hurt during which shifts.
There are specific details like being told you can't see a lawyer, being shackled to a bench for 17 hours, and so on.
Though the raid attracted major media attention, a team of attorneys could not find Church through 12 hours of "active searching", Sarah Gelsomino, Church's lawyer, recalled.
12 hours of active searching is very different than 12 hours of ordinary processing delays.
Don't you want your torture and beating spot to be super well known so people are like oh shit the Lubyanka.
Again, what I'm pushing back on is the idea that Hogan Square is a terrifying black hole, like the CIA's secret prisons. The story doesn't back that up with anything that looks specific or convincing.
Statistics on what happens to people in police custody should be collected. Police brutality is unacceptable and should be tracked and severely punished. I absolutely believe that plenty of it happens, and it's a real problem. No one should be kept away from their lawyer for an unreasonable period, and the periods mentioned in the article do sound unreasonable to me, albeit not shocking.
really light on specifics.
Because it is not so easy to extract info from CPD. The information presented is an argument for transparency, a response to the CPD claim that there's nothing wrong.
I'm really not saying that's an acceptable timelag, but if you heard that timelag described in a more neutrally written story, would your mind go straight to CIA black sites?
Bear in mind that the story is a follow-up to an investigation of the Chicago detective who went on to torture people in Gitmo, and part of a series on Chicago police misconduct.
Isn't the problem, and the basis for the analogy, that people at Homan don't get booked? It's an (illegal) limbo for the cops to do with you as they please. Whether there's a dedicated fingernail extraction room isn't really the point.
Not enough specific details? Someone should punch that Guardian reporter. But only if he's wearing a flak jacket.
Look, if you found the police department had somewhere it could put money without accounting for it you'd be safe in assuming someone was stealing. If you find they've got somewhere they can put people without accounting for them, you must surely be as suspicious as you would with the money.
Genuine question. My understanding is there's some kind of uniform-across-states (though not without exceptions) rule that you can only hold someone for 72 hours before charging them. I assume SCOTUS-based if it doesn't vary by state. Is there a similar rule about how long you can hold someone without booking them? If not, isn't that a systemic flaw?
Some people at Homan were simply released without a lawyer or being booked, and if that's combined with no badge numbers on those who deal with them, the end result is no way to prove they were ever in custody.
45, 47: I just don't see substantial fact allegations supporting the claim that prisoners in Honan Square are systematically not booked. There's one story, from one guy, who says that he wasn't booked for seventeen hours. That's a real abuse and a scandal in itself. But it's not much support for Honan Square as a location where arrestees are disappeared as a practice.
46: you punch a dude in the armor ONE TIME, they never let you forget it.
Can't we just give the CPD the benefit of the doubt here?
I'm basing it on this vague bit.
Unlike a precinct, no one taken to Homan Square is said to be booked. Witnesses, suspects or other Chicagoans who end up inside do not appear to have a public, searchable record entered into a database indicating where they are, as happens when someone is booked at a precinct.
Yeah, but that's weird writing. My knowledge of police procedures is weak and confused (and all this stuff varies by locality) but witnesses don't get booked anyplace, do they? Also, "is said to be" and "do not appear" are phrases that lead me to discount the rest of the sentence.
There could easily be all sorts of really bad stuff going on, and maybe it's specific to Honan Square, but this story read to me like a disproportionate amount of drama for the amount of fact it handed out.
43 students are said to have disappeared from Iguala, but there's no hard evidence on that point yet.
Why is a refusal to document process exoneration? Again, these are public servants who will not say how they are serving and protecting, beyond providing some signed confessions.
There's a list of 43 people with names whose friends and family say they existed, who can't be located. That might not be conclusive evidence of what happened to them, but it's good evidence that something did.
The good (not irrefutable, but good) evidence in the Guardian story about Honan Square is that Church was detained there for seventeen hours before being properly booked and allowed to see his lawyer. That's a scandal, but it doesn't make Honan Square a black site.
I see the absence of evidence (ie, police records available for review) as a clear problem, exactly analogous as GY says above to a slush fund account.
Feel free to differ-- if it really was just one dude, there are a thousand ways even a shambolic bureacracy could effectively respond to the accusation-- it was used only for overflow on busy days, some upper limit on residence time from this paperwork from last year, whatever.
How do you distinguish the situation where there are no records because of systematic abuse, and there are no records because nothing systematic was happening? I mean, what are you pointing to in the story as "If everything were okay, we would expect to see record X. CPD has denied that record X exists."
I didn't realise that booking databases, or whatever they're called, were publicly searchable, but presumably if so it can be easily verified if anyone is actually booked there. My reading of the article is that the claim is nobody is at all (the police dispute this) - they're either released or charged at a precinct.
All that said, the article does seem a bit overblown - the "military style vehicles" don't seem particularly evident in the photos, although there are mentions of MRAPs in the text.
The slush fund analogy was Alex! I didn't violate no ban.
I didn't realise that booking databases, or whatever they're called, were publicly searchable, but presumably if so it can be easily verified if anyone is actually booked there.
A couple of minutes poking around the CPD website doesn't make a public booking database obvious, but certainly the NY Courts have all sorts of non-obvious stuff online, so it might be there and I just haven't found it.
I haven't read the story. Count the number of rooms in the building suitable for holding suspects.
There was apparently a rule change a few years ago to close the loophole in initial record creation that allowed this place to exist.
There was knowledge in the police-accountability community. We knew exactly where it was, but we couldn't get the press in Chicago to cover the story. We think it started during [former Chicago Police Department Superintendent] Phil Cline's time around 2006 or 2007 until about 2011 when the city had roving special units [that worked out of Homan Square.]
Count the number of rooms in the building suitable for holding suspects.
I can't, I'm not in Chicago. Now what?
pf needs to step up and get himself arrested. If he does, we can even post about it using orange headlines.
but witnesses don't get booked anyplace, do they?
Not unless "booked" means something different in IL. Booked means booked into jail, or into a temp facility where you then get transported to jail. So either you have a warrant or are getting charged. But of course we're allowed to detain and interview a suspect without immediately charging them so there's no reason to think that a suspect should immediately show up on a public database. The lack of public access is a non starter. Our building is public, but only during business hours and it's not like we're interviewing suspects in the lobby. The suspect has to ask for the lawyer. If a lawyer just walked into our building and demands to be shown every room on the detective's floor to ensure his client isn't in police custody of course we're going to turn him away. My job is to get a suspect talking as much as possible, their job is to immediately tell that suspect to shut the hell up. That's the game and everyone knows it so don't whine that I don't do your job for you.
And by "bullshit" I meant that it's bullshit I don't have an awesome secret building. I'm always having to take dudes out to the duck marshes or give Cala a pack of smokes to use her basement.
Unless Cala is in prison, why can't you just give her money?
63. Resignedly accept the epistemological limitations of a comment-box based inquiry, I guess. O tempora O mores.
God that article is stupid in so many ways. Black site! Off the books! Featuring marked police vehicles and a city sign directing to the evidence and recovered property entrance. And my god, a reporter wasn't immediately given a full unfettered tour of a secure police facility? Something is amiss!
Right, but on the main point, you're just using Cala as an excuse to have cigarettes on your person so you don't have to admit you are smoking.
I find the headline obnoxious and aggrandizing (self-aggrandizing I guess, since it comes from a detainee) -- The Disppeared? Really? No one should be without a lawyer for 17 hours but you weren't shot in a football stadium or dropped over the Atlantic. Christ.
you weren't shot in a football stadium or dropped over the Atlantic
The soft bigotry of low expectations!
70: I'd probably love smoking but I've never tried it. Cops who don't carry smokes drive me nuts. Easiest way to get information. Look how Friedersdorf went looking for a story on the homeless without cigs. Fucking amateur.
Why can't you just give them $5 or whatever a pack costs there? That way, they could spend it on drugs or alcohol if they wanted to.
I'm guessing tequila shots would be at least as likely to get information as cigarettes, and possibly more likely! I also think that cop cars functioning basically as open bars would be a great exercise in community relations.
74: Dude, I've giving people cigs to chat them up, not whole packs. This is out of pocket, there isn't a dept. cigarette fund or anything.
(Anyone reading my comments should be aware that the location under discussion is Homan Square, not either Honan or Hogan Square. We apologize for the inconvenience.)
I was thinking full packs, like in prison or 66.
Why can't you just give them $5 or whatever a pack costs there?
I assume it comes across as a more comradely act to share your own.
He might get an even more friendly response with joints, but then he'd get the occasional uptight witness who gets offended...
Another story on the "black site"
https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2015/02/26/exclusive-chicago-black-site-detainee-speaks/
81: There sat Wright, innocently running a crack house with his cousin when the cops came in and arrested them. The police then took him back to the black site marked police building where their offices are at for several hours and attempted to get information on a crime with a victim. They didn't read him Miranda because a boot stamping on a human face forever Wright isn't a suspect in the murder they're asking about so they're not required to. Wright provided nothing about the murder so they booked him into jail on a crime he actually committed where he was given access to a defense attorney at no cost. The "torture" so haunts him he has abandoned the authentic blackness of dealing crack for college to be a network engineer.
DAMN YOU HOMAN SQUARE! DAMN YOU TO HELL!
There's an interview in the Atlantic that explains the denials. It WAS systematically worse, a place where people didn't show up in the system for longer than anywhere else, etc, and lawyers etc apparently got it fixed about a year ago. http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2015/02/behind-the-disappeared-of-chicagos-homan-square/385964/. Hence the present tense denials, which might not apply to past descriptions of abuses.
Gswift sees white and gold sites.
pwned by 62, sort of.
I told him that the CIA would totally call their equivalent of this a "temporary screening facility" not a secret prison.
I'm going to put Homan Square up on trip advisor.
"The room was small and uncomfortably warm. I was in there for several hours with no wifi and not offered a snack. One star."
Holy shit, another black site. I can personally attest to numerous times I've disappeared a suspect by taking them to the second floor of that building, where the public is not allowed, and asked them questions about crimes. Sometimes for hours! And they didn't show up as arrested until I booked them into jail! Guantanamo style, bitches.
There's this, too, gswift:
Meanwhile, Hutcherson -- also shackled to a bench -- was being interrogated in another room. "He [a Chicago police officer] gets up, walking toward me," Hutcherson alleges. "I already know what's finna happen. I brace myself, and he hit me a little bit and then take his foot and stepped on my groin." According to Hutcherson, the officer struck him two or three times in the face before kicking his penis.
I mean, maybe he's just making that up, but if true it's certainly not okay.
When I was arguing above, it's not that the individual stories aren't bad -- seventeen hours shackled to a bench, head injuries, now getting kicked in the groin -- and I do agree that it makes sense to treat individual bad stories as indicative of a systematic problem: if anyone's getting kicked in the groin during an interrogation, it seems likely that physically abusing suspects is a thing that's tolerated by the CPD.
It's just the connection to Homan Square's status as a 'black site' that seems weak to me.
I'm a little skeptical of that story. Maybe it happened, but mr main narrator in that article is all "it was my birthday I was just in the wrong place at the wrong time"...right after he describes being the money man at a crackhouse. Supposed groin kick victim also says he escaped by faking an asthma attack. Not likely. People fake that kind of thing all the time.
