Alwaght- Newly uncovered records reveal that at least 3,500 Americans, mostly blacks, have been detained inside a Chicago police warehouse described by some of its arrestees as a secretive interrogation facility.
Documents obtained by the Guardian show that at least 3,500 Americans were held at the secretive facility.
Of the thousands held in the facility known as Homan Square over a decade, 82% were black. Only three received documented visits from an attorney, according to a cache of documents obtained when the Guardian sued the police.
Despite repeated denials from the Chicago police department that the warehouse is a secretive, off-the-books anomaly, the Homan Square files begin to show how the city’s most vulnerable people get lost in its criminal justice system.
Documents indicate the detainees are a group of disproportionately minority citizens, many accused of low-level drug crimes, faced with incriminating themselves before their arrests appeared in a booking system by which their families and attorneys might find them.
Prominent civil rights lawyers who reviewed the data condemned Chicago police and politicians for having long denied the existence of the facility.
“I am extremely troubled but sadly not shocked at the exceedingly broad scope and fundamentally racist nature of the unconstitutional police conduct at Homan Square that the Guardian’s most recent study documents,” said Flint Taylor.
“Hopefully, Chicago’s political leadership and its establishment media will finally take notice and stop collaborating to bury this story, so righteously championed by the Guardian, under the rug of denial and false ignorance,” Taylor added.
The United States has suffered from an epidemic of racial discrimination throughout its history, which some experts say has increased after the election of President Barack Obama
The killing of black men by white police officers has triggered numerous protests in the United States since the August 2014 death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri.
Police brutality and the unnecessary use of heavy-handed tactics have become a major concern across the US in recent years. US police shoot and kill an average of 1,000 people a year, 1 in 4 of whom are unarmed, according to a report by the Police Policy Studies Council.