Homan Square, once a warehouse on Chicago’s west side, is a
Chicago Police Special Operations detention and interrogation center. The
center is accused of abusing prisoners, holding them for hours without any
official record of their detention, and preventing them from their legal right
to be represented by an attorney. The center has been likened to a CIA black
site, according to The Guardian.
The allegations are not new. The Chicago Police Department’s
mistreatment of prisoners over the years has been widely known and reported.
Jon
Burge, a former Chicago Police Department commander, was convicted and sentenced
on January 21, 2011 to four-and-one-half years in federal prison for torturing
more than 200 prisoners in order to force confessions from them. Burge was
accused of using electrical shock, suffocation with a plastic bag, and burning and
beating of prisoners held at Homan Square.
The Chicago Police Department practice of denying detainees
access to lawyers has been a systemic problem for decades. Representing
indigent clients who want to speak to an attorney, First Defense Legal Aid Executive
Director Eliza Solowiej said,
“It's not just this facility. This is a citywide problem.”
There is much that needs to change in our country. America’s
values are slumping at an alarming rate. Among them are the egregious, systemic
constitutional violations embedded in our systems of justice and law
enforcement. Americans sanction justifiable killings and brutal use of force by
police. Most Americans passively accept the militarization of police. In many
cities, the police are essentially paramilitary units.
In the ways America has passively sanctioned torture by the
CIA, Chicago, considering the lack of the city to take any action so far, has sanctioned
police actions under the guise of keeping its city safe.
If The Guardian’s accusations against the Chicago Police are
true, without redress it may set the stage for Police Departments in other major
cities to do the same thing. The United States will then have dumped another
one of its fundamental principles and humanitarian values into the accumulative
abyss of values that apparently have been long forgotten.
Copyright © 2015 Horatio Green
Sources:
Spencer Ackerman, The
disappeared: Chicago police detain Americans at abuse-laden 'black site',
The Guardian
Spencer Ackerman, Zach Stafford, Mark Guarino, Oliver
Laughland, 'Gestapo'
tactics at US police 'black site' ring alarm from Chicago to Washington,
The Guardian
Spencer Ackerman, Held
for hours at secret Chicago 'black site': 'You're a hostage. It's kidnapping',
The Guardian
