1. Homan Square: Another Shaming Secret in the
“Windy City”
By Luisa Muñiz
It was late in the morning of June 29, 2006 when Kory Wright –a young black man –decided to
go to a relative to have his hair braided. As he was having his hair braided on the porch, a
woman approached his relative to buy some drugs. This was not unusual, since Wright knew
about his relative’s businesses; however, after a minute or two, the Chicago police burst into
Wright’s relative’s house, arrested Wright and three other people and took them to a
“warehouse.” Neither Wright nor the others were booked, and their fingerprints were not taken.
Wright was then tied to a bench, with both his hands strapped to the sides. He had no access to a
telephone, restroom or water for six hours. “I was in the wrong place at the wrong time.” Wright
recalled. It was his 21st birthday.
Almost ten years passed before Wright’s story came to light. On February 24, 2015 the
Guardian broke the news to the world: Chicago was home to a secret, and apparently illegal,
interrogation facility, owned and operated by the Chicago Police Department since 1999, known
as Homan Square. The victims’ accounts of their experiences in the facility, where torture was
employed as the main method of interrogation, and where at least one detainee was found dead
in an interview room in 2013, lead people to think of it as the “domestic equivalent of a CIA
black site.”
Many civil rights activists agree with this view, including Tracy Siska, executive director
of the Chicago Justice Project: “The real danger in allowing practices like Guantánamo or Abu
Ghraib is the fact that they always creep into domestic law enforcement, either with weaponry
like with the militarization of the police, or interrogation practices. That’s how we ended up with
a black site in Chicago” he told the Guardian.
Homan Square is located on Chicago’s West Side, more specifically, in North Lawndale,
one of the poorest neighborhoods in Chicago (their income per capita is a little over 12
thousand), with a population predominantly Black and Hispanic. The facility, which until last
month appeared to be nothing more than just an abandoned red-brick building, once served as the
original Sears world headquarters, whose 3 million square feet made it the world’s largest
business building of the early 1900’s. Now it is a CPD facility conveniently located in a
marginalized community.
Lawyers and civil rights organizations leaders agree that the main target of the officers
working in Homan Square are American minorities. “It started with terrorism, now they bring
people involved with drugs, then gang related activities,” said Melissa Williams, chairman of the
Chicago West Branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People
Criminal Justice Committee. “The majority of the people detained [at Homan] are young, poor,
black and brown people sent there for street crimes.”
Tracy Siska says he has known about the situation in Homan Square “since about the
mid- to late-2000’s.” According to The Intercept, when asked why the American media hadn’t

2. covered the abuses occurring in Homan Square, Siska replied: “That’s the million dollar
question. The problem is a lot of reporters agree with the police perspective.”
Since the Guardian brought to light the on-goings in Homan Square in late February,
national media outlets such as Fox, MSNBC, and CNN are refusing to cover the story.
According to TheAntiMedia.org they are “running stories about Homan Square that were direct
copies from CPD’s public relations statements.”
On March 1, the CPD released a 3-page statement called “Chicago Police Department
Fact Sheet.” Here, the CPD denied the information made public by the Guardian calling it
“inaccurate and misleading.” The CPD also said that Homan Square “serves a number of
functions, some of which are sensitive, some of which are not, however it is not a secret facility.”
As for the torture accusations, the CPD said they are “offensive and not supported by any facts
whatsoever.” These declarations echo back to the only statement made by the current mayor of
Chicago, Rahm Emanuel, when he was asked about the allegations: “that’s not true. We follow
the rules.”
“Not in America”
There are 11 people thus far who have claimed they were taken to Homan Square in the past,
where they were denied of their basic Constitutional rights. Brian Jacob Church was the first
victim to speak about his confinement. Church is known as one of the “NATO 3”, a group of
three anti-NATO protesters who, in 2012, were accused of conspiracy to commit terrorism.
According to him, he and other 11 anti-NATO protesters were taken to the facility after a police
raid. Officers kept Church for 17 hours, handcuffed to a little bench, and denying him access to
an attorney; then he was sent to a nearby police station. Only then he was properly booked and
charged.
“Homan Square is definitely an unusual place,” Church told the Guardian. “It brings to
mind the interrogation facilities they use in the Middle East. The CIA calls them black sites. It’s
a domestic black site.”
Church is not the only one to make references to the Middle East when talking about
Homan Square. José García, who was taken to the facility on September 29, 2011, after a police
raid in Paseo Boricua Grocery & Deli where he worked as a cook, told the Guardian: “They all
had masks, all of them. They looked like Isis – put it that way.” He also said that the cops were
armed with “machine guns.”
John Vergara, an art teacher, was also at Paseo Boricua that night. He had stopped in for
a coffee when a group of armed men wearing ski masks burst into the place, demanding
everyone, with their guns drawn, to put their hands on the counter. “At first I thought it was a
robbery,” Vergara recalled. “I didn’t know it was the police until the sergeant walked in.” He
told the Guardian.
Immediately after these accounts were made public, politicians and civil rights activists
demanded a thorough investigation. One of the first officials to respond to this demand was Cook
County Commissioner Richard Boykin, who said that after touring the facility he left with more

3. questions than answers. “It’s one thing to quell demonstration and protests, but it’s another thing
to use antiquated Gestapo tactics that are more commonly found in parts of the underdeveloped
world or in places like China or Russia.” Boykin told the Guardian, “not in America.”
“You have no rights at Homan”
Vic Suter was another anti-NATO protester taken to Homan Square the same night that Brian
Jacob Church was arrested. Suter was confined there for 18 hours before she was permitted
access to a lawyer. She described the situation as being “held hostage.” “The stark difference
between Homan and a county jail or a precinct… is that you have no rights at Homan.” Suter
told the Guardian.
There are several recurring facts in the testimonies of the elven detainees who have
spoken about Homan that represent a problem for the CPD: their Miranda rights were not
mentioned at the time of the arrest (both Vergara and García said police officers never read them
their rights, meant to protect against self-implication); they were denied their right to an attorney
during the interrogations (even though they all asked for one at some point); they were held for
extended periods of time without being charged of a crime (one of them claims he was held for
three days without being charged, even though a charge has to be brought within 48 hours);
finally, they did not receive a humane treatment (most of the accounts describe beatings, being
shackled, verbal abuse, and being fed poorly).
“This Homan Square revelation seems to me to be an institutionalization of the practice
that dates back more than 40 years,” told civil-rights attorney Flint Taylor to the Guardian “of
violating a suspect or witness’ rights to a lawyer and not to be physically or otherwise coerced
into giving a statement.” According to Taylor, the police practices described in the victims’
testimonies violate the fifth, sixth and eighth amendments of the US constitution.
Not the first time in Chicago
This is hardly the first time that the so-called “windy city” faces a police torture scandal. Over
the past four decades, the taxpayers of Chicago have paid tens of millions of dollars in restitution
to victims of the CPD. At least $27 million have gone directly to cover lawsuit settlements
involving eighteen victims of the former CPD detective Jon Burge. Burge, along with other
detectives under his command (known as the “Midnight Crew”), was accused of torturing more
than 100 criminal suspects between 1972 and 1991 in order to extract confessions. Among the
methods of torture that Burge employed are electric shocks to the genitals, suffocation, “Russian
roulette,” mock executions, and beatings, techniques he had learned in Mekong Delta in 1968.
More recently, Chicago has been dealing with the case of Richard Zuley, another former
Chicago Police Department detective who, in 2003, was sent to Guantánamo Bay on a special
assignment to aid in the interrogation of a terrorism suspect. According to the Guardian, Zuley’s
torture techniques in Guantánamo “set the bar high for brutality.” Currently, there are at least
three convicts (each of them facing more than 60 years in prison) condemned under Zuley’s

4. police work who proclaim innocence, and who maintain that their convictions relied merely on
interrogations coercively obtained.
In the past, Amnesty International USA has lobbied Mayor Emanuel to commit to a
program of reparations for the victims of police abuse. Emanuel, however, has not yet committed
to the program. In a letter to the mayor, the executive director of Amnesty USA, Steven Hawkins
wrote: “you have a responsibility under US and international law to ensure that human rights
violations are not committed within the city.” Jasmine Heiss, Amnesty USA’s senior
campaigner, agrees. According to the Guardian, she believes that a city ordinance to oversee
police procedures is necessary for a fair criminal justice system in Chicago: “without a clear
commitment to addressing things like police torture, it gives torturers the go ahead to continue to
undermine the rule of law.”