Pubdate: Fri, 15 May 2015
Source: Guardian, The (UK)
Copyright: 2015 Guardian News and Media Limited
Contact:  http://www.guardian.co.uk/guardian/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/175
Author: Spencer Ackerman

RAPE AND ABUSE CLAIMS IN US POLICE 'BLACK SITE'

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. Perez had been driving his 4x4 on his 
restaurant delivery route the day before when he says police accosted 
him, wanting him to contact a drug dealer who they believed Perez 
knew, so they could arrange a sting. Perez was less cooperative than 
they had hoped.

That day, 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 refiled 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. Perez is now the 13th person the 
Guardian has interviewed since February who has described being taken 
by police to the warehouse on Chicago's west side; kept without a 
record of his whereabouts available to the public; and shackled for 
hours or even days without access to a lawyer.

Most of them have been black, Hispanic and poor. Some allege physical 
abuse; all allege that they were in an inherently coercive environment.

Few were charged with a crime, and police took those who were to 
actual police stations for booking after detention at Homan. Police 
and local media have dismissed their stories. Perez claims he was 
bent over in front of the bench. 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."

Whatever the object was, the police suggested it was the barrel of a 
handgun. After Perez involuntarily jerked from the penetration, 
Zablocki is alleged to have told him: "I almost blew your brains 
out." Perez claims all this occurred to persuade him to purchase $170 
worth of heroin from the dealer.

The abuse Perez alleges is reminiscent of an earlier era of police 
torture in Chicago, when Darrell Cannon had a shotgun barrel jammed 
into his mouth. Last week, decades after Cannon's abuse, Chicago 
established a reparations fund for survivors of police torture. Perez 
is still seeking justice.

He initially filed a lawsuit against the police detailing his 
allegations of sexual abuse in 2013, which attracted attention from 
Courthouse News and Vice. But what he has since learned is that his 
ordeal took place at Homan Square, the off-the-books detention centre 
considered by lawyers and activists to be the law enforcement 
analogue of a CIA black site. Weeks ago, four other people detained 
at Homan Square from 2006 to 2015 joined his lawsuit.

Videos Perez acquired through his legal proceedings show him inside 
the warehouse complex and corroborate the dates and times of his 
detention there.

The effect of the sexual torture was similar to Cannon's. Cannon 
falsely confessed to a murder. Perez told Lopez and Zablocki he would 
buy the heroin.

"After they did that, I would have done anything for them," said 
Perez, who was not charged with any crime related to his Homan Square 
detention.

He called "D", whom court papers allege is a man named Dwayne, and 
arranged to purchase heroin with $170 the police gave him.

The Chicago police department has reacted with indignation and 
nonspecific denials of the Guardian's Homan Square reporting.

"The allegation that physical violence is a part of interviews with 
suspects is unequivocally false, it is offensive, and it is not 
supported by any facts whatsoever," the police said in a 1 March 
statement. The police downplayed Homan's detention operations, saying 
that like other police facilities in the city, it contained "several 
standard interview rooms". Most people interviewed at Homan Square 
were "low-level arrests from the narcotics unit".

Yet the videos show police leading Perez, hands confined behind his 
back, through a door inside Homan Square marked "prisoner entrance", 
suggesting a more routine detention function than the police have 
described. Perez was never formally arrested: he was neither booked 
nor permitted legal counsel nor charged.

"No inmates are supposed to be there. Certainly they're not supposed 
to be held there," said Perez's attorney, Scott Kamin.

The other people who signed on to Perez's lawsuit have also told 
their stories for the first time. Their further revelations, 
including confinement in fetid and humiliating conditions, now mark 
17 first-hand accounts of detention at Homan Square since the 
Guardian began reporting on the warehouse in February. The most 
recent occurred fewer than three weeks before the initial report.

Jose Martinez is alleged to have been cuffed to a bench for nine 
hours before being booked at an actual police station in September 
2011. He claims that he was shackled "without food, water or use of 
the restroom" in a "locked room that smelled like urine and faeces".

Two other individuals, Estephanie Martinez and Calvin Coffey, 
described relieving themselves while shackled in Homan Square 
interrogation rooms. Martinez, locked up in August 2006, was told by 
a guard that she did not have the key to Martinez's handcuffs and 
could not take her to the toilet. Coffey, taken to Homan Square on 6 
February 2015 on suspicion of "narcotic activity", defecated on the 
floor after two hours of fruitless requests to use the toilet. A 
police officer "made Calvin clean it up with his skull cap", the 
lawsuit alleges.

Juanita Berry was with Coffey at the time of his detention and was 
taken with him to Homan Square. Handcuffed to a "ring or a bar on the 
wall", the lawsuit alleges, officers told her to get them two 
handguns "or else they would charge her with aiding in the delivery 
of controlled substance".

After Berry acquired a gun from an unspecified acquaintance, 
satisfied police allegedly drove her to a Dunkin' Donuts and let her 
go without charge.

Berry's account echoes that of a different Chicago man, not a party 
to the lawsuit, whom the Guardian has separately interviewed and 
agreed to identify as Young OG so as not to risk his further 
harassment by police. He said Homan Square police kept him detained 
for nearly an entire day before he agreed to get them guns.

Young OG, a black man in his 30s, was picked up by masked police, 
guns drawn, after he stopped at a petrol station with a friend in 
late 2013 for cigarettes. It was mid-morning and Young OG was 
confused over whether he was getting robbed or stopped by police. "It 
was a real-life kidnapping," he said.

At Homan Square, police kept Young OG confined with a twist tie on 
his right wrist. Young OG was kept, he said, in an office-like space 
without furniture, causing him to sit on a dirty floor and lay on his 
hooded sweatshirt.

He was not fed, not booked, not permitted a lawyer and afforded one 
brief bathroom break.

Late that evening, police came to Young OG, woke him up, and said 
they wanted him to provide them with weapons. One officer had what 
looked like packets of heroin. "It's gonna be yours before the 
night's over if you don't cooperate with us," Young OG recalled a 
masked officer telling him.

"As soon as you help us, the sooner you'll get out of here," he 
recalled an officer saying. A white officer "went straight to guns", 
saying that Young OG needed to get them for the police.

Young OG was allowed to call his friend, whom the Guardian has agreed 
to identify as "Head". He told Head: "Police got us, bro, they're 
trying to pin us on some bullshit." With the knowledge of the police, 
Young OG instructed Head to place any gun he could find in a garbage 
can behind Young OG's grandmother's house.

Head did as his friend asked. "By 2.30, they were picking the shit 
out from the garbage," Head said. Police let Young OG and his friend 
go later that morning without charge. Young OG never got his mobile 
phone, his ID or his wallet back.

The Chicago police department did not respond to a list of questions 
sent to them for this story. Last month, the Guardian sued the 
Chicago police department after attempts at acquiring official police 
records about Homan Square under the Freedom of Information Act 
proved fruitless.

The police are scheduled to file their first response today. Among 
the records sought are a tally of how many people have been taken to 
Homan Square, and any video evidence of interrogations and detentions 
evidence that Perez's case has independently turned up.

A spokesman for Chicago's Independent Police Review Authority, Larry 
Merritt, said it had investigated Perez's claims and deemed them 
"unfounded". He would not elaborate and invited the Guardian to file 
a Freedom of Information Act request to learn more.

Perez said that while he "would love to see those cops in jail", the 
long history of Chicago police abuse did not give him reason for 
optimism. "At this point, I just want them to stop. I know they're 
never going to go to jail. So I'm hoping maybe they'll get fired if 
we expose enough of what they do. But really, I even doubt that'll 
happen in this city."
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MAP posted-by: Jay Bergstrom