There’s a shocking story that came out yesterday about the
Chicago Police Department using an unmarked warehouse called Homan Square on
the West Side to hold certain suspects without arrest, without charges being
filed and with no access to an attorney. It is essentially a CIA-like “black
site” where cops could hold and interrogate someone without putting that person
into the criminal justice system.
You’ll find an excellent article in the Guardian about Homan
Square here, that provides a much more in-depth look at this
unconstitutional travesty.
My first thought is, if Chicago has a place like Homan
Square, isn’t it reasonable to assume that other large city police forces have
similar facilities? Can Chicago be the only one? I doubt it.
As people interviewed in the article say, it sounds as if
Homan Square was modeled after CIA black site interrogation facilities in the
Middle East, although the practice of taking suspects “off site” for
interrogations has been going on as far back as the 1970s. Why haven’t we heard
about this before? One, the practice is generally reserved for poor people of
color who are essentially voiceless in America. Two, those people detained at
Homan Square understood that if they did talk about it, they could be taken
back and disappeared.
Finally, this is one more glaring example of the
militarization of America’s police forces. From combat gear to armored vehicles
to black sites for off-the-record interrogations, the lines between keeping the
peace and a police state grow blurrier by the day.
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