Domestic Blacksite maintained by Chicago Police Department

Xelebes said:

So. . . I am coming across these articles which people are saying are effective blacksites operated by the Chicago Police Department.


http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/feb/24/chicago-homan-square-black-site

http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/feb/24/chicago-police-detain-americans-black-site



I'm still reading on this.

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rugcat said:

I did have friends who bailed me out, and they did find me. It was not an enjoyable experience. But looking back, I think everybody should spend at least one night in jail. It does tend to broaden one's perspective.

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Hapax Legomenon said:

That seems like a rather terrible idea, considering what happened to Sandra Bland and others.

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rugcat said:

There are some very bad things that can happen if you're arrested. But considering there were some 11 million arrests in 2014, it has to be kept in perspective.

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rugcat said:

I had the privilege of being arrested by the Chicago PD back in the 60s.

I was not beaten, but I did have the honor of sharing a holding cell in the Cook County jail with six young black men. Stereotyper that I am, I assumed they were gang members. They all seemed to know each other, at least.

I also assumed that the booking officers thought it would be amusing to see what might happen me since they vanished and I did not see them for hours. Racial tensions at the time, which was not long after MLK was assassinated, we're rather high.

My fellow inmates, however, paid little attention to me except for a perfunctory "s'up" or whatever the standard greeting was back then – my memory is fading.

I did have friends who bailed me out, and they did find me. It was not an enjoyable experience. But looking back, I think everybody should spend at least one night in jail. It does tend to broaden one's perspective.

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Hapax Legomenon said:

That seems like a rather terrible idea, considering what happened to Sandra Bland and others.

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rugcat said:

There are some very bad things that can happen if you're arrested. But considering there were some 11 million arrests in 2014, it has to be kept in perspective.

http://www.drugwarfacts.org/cms/Crime#sthash.k1Hn3EX8.dpbs

In a lot of urban neighborhoods, you're in far more peril walking home from the corner grocery then from going to jail. Certainly you're in more danger driving across town that going to jail. But it's experience that if more people went through it, perhaps they'd have a more accurate view of the criminal justice system.

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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.

“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.”

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Hapax Legomenon said:

"You might be lynched and your lynching made to look like a suicide, but that probably won't happen..."

The thread is literally about people getting beaten and disappeared by the police, you know?

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JetFueledCar said:

The really sad thing is that nothing about this surprises me. Least of all the attempted derail.

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rugcat said:

if you're speaking about Sandra bland, there's absolutely zero evidence that she was "lynched." She was a disturbed woman who committed suicide. The precipitating factor was an absurd and illegal arrest which led to this tragedy, and is not, nor should not, be minimized, but neither should conspiracy theories take the place of facts.

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rugcat said:

it doesn't surprise me in the least either. I lived in Chicago for five years during a time when "hippies" we're considered by police to be almost as bad as black people. I dealt with the police often, not only did I get bailed out, I bailed out many of my friends.

The Chicago police were known even back then as one of the most racist and corrupt police departments in the country. I wasn't trying to derail, just a little bit of fact that I thought might be interesting since I'm probably the only person on this board that was ever (unjustifiably) arrested by the Chicago police, and one of the very few who dealt with them on a regular basis.

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rugcat said:

My point was not that it's no big deal to be arrested; in fact, they were clearly hoping I would get the shit beat out of me, but it didn't work out that way.

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For psychological reasons, Angel Perez does not call what happened to him rape. But he vividly recalls being taken to Homan Square, a warehouse used by the Chicago police for incommunicado detentions, where police inserted something into his rectum.

“I felt the coldness and the metallic aspect of it,” Perez, 33, told the Guardian.


It was 21 October 2012. The day before, Perez had been driving his Rav-4 on his restaurant delivery route when he says police accosted him, wanting him to contact a drug dealer who they believed Perez knew so they could arrange a sting. But Perez was less cooperative than they had hoped.


Now, Perez was handcuffed by his right wrist to a metal bar behind a bench in an interrogation room on the second floor of Homan Square. Behind him were two police officers that a lawsuit Perez recently re-filed identifies as Jorge Lopez and Edmund Zablocki. They had been threatening him with a stint at the infamously violent Cook County jail if he didn’t cooperate.


“They’re gonna think you’re a little sexy bitch in jail,” Perez recalled one of them saying. The lawsuit quotes Lopez: “I hear that a big black nigger dick feels like a gun up your ass.”


Perez claims he was bent over in front of the bench and a piece of detritus. He recalled smelling urine and seeing bloodstains in the room. The police officers pulled his shirt up and slowly moved a metallic object down his bare skin. Then they pulled his pants down.


“He’s talking all this sexual stuff, he’s really getting fucking weird about it, too,” Perez remembered. He began shaking, the beginnings of a panic attack.


“They get down to where they’re gonna insert it, this is where I feel that it’s something around my rear end, and he said some stupid comment and then he jammed it in there and I started jerking and going all crazy – I think I kicked him – and I just go into a full-blown panic attack … The damage it caused, it pretty much swole my rear end like a baboon’s butt.”


Whatever the object was, the police suggested it was the barrel of a handgun. After Perez involuntarily jerked from the penetration, Officer Edmund Zablocki is alleged to have told him: “I almost blew your brains out.”

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rugcat said:

Of course, my arrest was ultimately nothing more than a minor inconvenience. The same could not be said for many of the black residents of Chicago. But my point was actually that if more people had to deal with the results of an interaction with a unjust police department, they might tend to take more of an interest in what it actually entails, and how they are treated, even if it's on a much lesser level. Thus, the idea that everybody should spend a night in jail – not entirely serious, but not entirely in jest either.

When you're safe at home in your suburbs, and just reading about it in the paper, and it doesn't affect you in the slightest, it's easy to shrug. If you've ever been in jail, you might follow it with a bit more interest.

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