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Dead Constitution See other Dead Constitution Articles Title: How Chicago police used marijuana to disappear young people at Homan Square Marc Freeman and ‘Stephanie’ detained for hours inside so-called ‘black site’ so they would confess and implicate others Marc Freeman is the 11th person to come forward to the Guardian detailing detention inside Homan Square – and the first whose police record details how long he was stuck inside. ‘At no point was I ever processed, I was never asked for my information, they did not take any fingerprints,’ he said. The story of Marc Freeman’s disappearance inside Chicago’s Homan Square police warehouse on a marijuana offense last year exists between the lines of his arrest report – as his time in custody was not logged on the books until he surfaced at a police station seven hours after his arrest. At 3.35pm on 22 October 2014, Chicago police arrested Freeman for possession of about two pounds of marijuana. From there, the police report states, Freeman was “transported to Homan for further processing”. The report specifies nothing about Freeman’s time at the secretive compound save for a seeming arrival at 4.10pm, only to note that he arrived in nearby district 11 lockup at 10.32pm. The disappeared: Chicago police detain Americans at abuse-laden 'black site' Read more During the intervening hours, Freeman was lost to the outside world – denied, by police, any phone calls, attorney visits or a record of where he was. Shackled inside Homan Square, Freeman told the Guardian, as have 10 others, he was neither booked nor otherwise processed at a facility some have likened to the domestic equivalent of a CIA ‘black site’. “Stephanie” encountered a similar circumstance in 2010. Even after police got all they needed from her, she recalled in interviews with the Guardian, they still cuffed her to a metal bar inside a cell at Homan Square for nearly half a day while other officers initially told her frantic siblings they didn’t know her whereabouts. “I was so scared, I didn’t even know if I could see a lawyer. I assumed that wasn’t even an option, that whatever they say goes,” she said. The 12-hour ordeal for Stephanie – who did not wish to speak on the record or use her real name for fear of jeopardizing her job prospects – took place after police found one ounce of marijuana in her car. These two stories, four years apart, indicate how police units operating out of Homan Square hold people incommunicado for hours on non-violent marijuana offenses to get them to confess or implicate others. Freeman’s experience, just five months old, contradicts Chicago police assurances that all Homan Square detentions and interrogations are sufficiently documented – and reveals what a disappearance inside the police warehouse sounds like when translated into the bureaucratic language of an arrest report. Advertisement Illinois is among of a growing list of states experimenting with decriminalizing marijuana. The experiences of Freeman and Stephanie also highlight an aspect of policing in Chicago that the US justice department recently focused on in Ferguson, Missouri: the ability of police to legally confiscate money from arrestees. Chicago police did not respond to questions for this story. The department has not responded to any factual query for a series of Guardian investigations over the last three weeks. The police department asserted in a recent “factsheet” that “[m]ost individuals interviewed at Homan Square are lower-level arrests from the Narcotics unit. There are always records of anyone who is arrested by CPD, and this is no different at Homan Square.” In an earlier statement, police said: “If lawyers have a client detained at Homan Square, just like any other facility, they are allowed to speak to and visit them.” But there wasn’t public documentation of Stephanie or Freeman’s time within Homan Square at the time of their detention, nor did they receive access to counsel. Freeman’s late 2014 case also casts doubt on police assurances to activists and lawyers in 2012 that quiet rules changes would eliminate civil-rights abuses at the warehouse – a place that activists, local politicians, attorneys and victims consider to be the intersection of historic, racialized police abuses and the post-9/11 militarization of law enforcement. Stephanie was never charged with a crime. Freeman ultimately was sentenced to probation for a misdemeanor. Both of them are white. The time spent in Homan Square was, for both, their first experience in police custody. Post Comment Private Reply Ignore Thread
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