Portside

For nearly two decades, when Chicago’s police brought people under arrest to their detentions and interrogations warehouse, not even the vast majority of the police force knew where they were, according to an internal memo acquired by the Guardian.

Homan Square, a warehouse complex headquartering narcotics, vice and intelligence units for the Chicago police, has also served as a secretive facility for detaining and interrogating thousands of people without providing access to attorneys and with little way for their loved ones to find them. Records documenting the presence of someone at Homan Square, especially while they are there, have existed largely outside Chicago police’s electronic records system.

Now, documents and evidence from senior officers have for the first time disclosed detailed official accounts of how police based at the unit were able to operate – and how it was almost impossible to tell who was being held inside.Depositions of senior officers, memorandums for the current police chief and other internal police records portray Chicago police procedures and record-keeping that obscured visibility into Homan Square’s apparatus of detentions, both to the public and even to police themselves.

The records and supporting testimony portray a complicated system of documentation that helps explain how Chicago police, particularly from the bureau of organized crime, could use their headquarters for incommunicado detentions and interrogations without attracting significant public notice.

Interrogations are the purpose of the incommunicado detentions, the police depositions indicate. In practice, police leverage an arrestee’s inability to notify relatives or lawyers about their whereabouts – a perilous position, from a civil rights perspective – to generate information about guns or drugs on Chicago’s streets.

Over a year into the Guardian’s ongoing exposé of what happened inside Homan Square, it appears that police have recently changed their logging procedures there.

“Prior to 2016, the only electronic record that could determine with any certainty that an individual was at the Homan Square facility is via the Arrestee Movement records in the Automated Arrest Application,” Randolph Nichols, a senior officer in the Chicago police research department, wrote to acting superintendent John J Escalante in an 11 March memo about the Guardian’s freedom of information lawsuit into Homan Square.

In a possible indication of changes to the logging system, Nichols told the Guardian in a September deposition that the police “actually just created a unit the other day for Homan Square arrest processing”. The Chicago police did not respond to a detailed list of questions before publication.

According to records the Guardian’s lawsuit has compelled the police to disclose, the arrestee movement records, which detail police moving a detainee from a regular police station to Homan Square and back, are a small fraction of Homan Square arrests.

The digitized records show 275 arrests between 2004 and mid-2015 that, by Nichols’ explanation, would have been accessible to police outside the warehouse – however unavailable to the public. Those 275 arrests represent less than 4% of the 7,351 arrests at Homan Square during that time period thus far disclosed.

Asked how a member of the public can find anyone held at Homan Square while police hold them there, a senior police official said in sworn deposition: “I don’t know that you can contemporaneously.”Police contend that the Guardian’s coverage of Homan Square overemphasizes the secrecy surrounding the warehouse’s detentions and interrogations practices. But in court, they also concede the secrecy, and argue for its necessity, on the grounds that a normal police station, vastly more open to the public, cannot accommodate undercover officers.Police at Homan “might try to turn them into a confidential informant. So you want some privacy to do that. In a district facility, you don’t have any privacy,” Nichols said in deposition.

“Some districts do not have the facilities to keep covert our undercover officers,” Lieutenant William Kilroy, a senior narcotics officer at the Homan Square-based bureau of organized crime, said in his November deposition.

The impact is that the arrest and interrogation of more than 7,000 people was able to happen without a public notification of their whereabouts, at a warehouse empowered to take in arrests from around the city. Fewer than 1% of those held at Homan Square had access to an attorney.

At least 14 men in custody were punched, struck with nightsticks, slapped, Tasered or subjected to another form of physical violence at Homan Square, according to Chicago police records, which also show at least two people who were taken to the warehouse died there.

A still untold number of people were arrested for petty offenses, interrogated at Homan Square, converted into informants and let go.

While most arrests concern guns and drugs, consistent with the narcotics, anti-gang and vice units operating out of the warehouse, others deal with less urgent crime priorities.According to police documents, at least 11 people observed by investigators for the Recording Industry Association of America selling bootleg CDs and DVDs (including Jay Z albums and Marvel’s Iron Man movie) were “taken to Homan Square for processing”. A woman was “transported to Homan Square for processing” after police observing a fencing location for stolen goods found her with “2 cans of Tasters Choice decaffeinated coffee with Walgreens anti-theft stickers”.“Very frequently”, someone arrested at Homan Square will not be subsequently charged with a crime, said Kilroy, the senior narcotics officer, adding: “They convert into a cooperating individual.”

Kilroy took issue with various aspects of the Guardian’s reporting on Homan Square. He said that officers “never” hold arrestees overnight at the warehouse, something numerous former detainees have described in Guardian interviews.

Kilroy described a substantial amount of routine procedure at Homan Square as part of a deposition for the ongoing transparency lawsuit concerning records from the warehouse. The lieutenant said that while arrest reports are filed electronically city-wide, many other records for people taken to Homan Square are separated from the electronic files accessible by police based outside the warehouse.

Homan Square-based police who fall under the umbrella of the bureau of organized crime do “not do electronic case reporting”, Kilroy testified. “Everybody outside the bureau does electronic case reporting. We do hard-copy paper case reporting.”

Explaining the distinction, Kilroy said the case reports, as well as related supplemental files, are documents that provide additional detail about an investigation, while an arrest report “centers on an arrestee”. The case reports exist physically, not digitally, “in a secure office inside secure filing cabinets inside Homan Square”.Some 75% of Homan Square arrests thus far acknowledged by the Chicago police are narcotics arrests, which fall under the purview of the paper-centric bureau of organized crime.

Publicly available arrest reports for people known to have been held at Homan Square, viewed by the Guardian, do not always indicate their presence at the warehouse, despite the police’s March 2015 “factsheet” claiming: “Officers will create an Automated Arrest Report, which identifies the location of the arrestee.” The arrest report, in any case, is generated after someone is held at Homan Square, which does not perform bookings.

Kilroy continued: “Everyone who is brought up into Homan is logged in or should be logged in. I can’t say it’s 100%, but that’s what we require the officers, that once they secure them in one of the interview rooms, then they immediately proceed to the 24-hour desk where there’s a paper log and they write the name of the arrestee and the officer and what room they’ve been placed in.”

The paper logs do not necessarily distinguish between people under arrest and people acting as police informants, Kilroy said in sworn deposition. The Guardian is currently negotiating with police over disclosure of the paper logs – the only comprehensive record that can reveal the full extent of incommunicado detentions at the warehouse.

Kilroy indicated that police have developed less formal ways of letting worried relatives or confused attorneys know where their loved ones or clients are.

Homan Square police “notify the district of arrest that we that have taken this person into custody”, Kilroy said. But he was “not certain” if watch commanders at the stations record a local’s arrest at Homan Square on a watch log for reference when relatives or attorneys unable to find their loved ones or clients come calling.

Kilroy estimated that there have been “six or seven attorneys who have come to Homan Square over the past, I don’t know, five, 10 years. It’s been that infrequent.” Chicago police have disclosed 86 attorney visits over the past decade – nine of which occurred after the Guardian’s reporting on the warehouse began – and say, through their lawyers, that the tally is comprehensive. At least two arrestees who the disclosures say received lawyers have denied it to the Guardian.

Lawyers interviewed by the Guardian have said they have been turned away from Homan Square when they came seeking their clients. Last year, attorney Cliff Nellis said that when he arrived at Homan Square seeking a client in 2014, police told him: “This isn’t a police station, we don’t hold people here.” Nellis and other attorneys say that frequently, after police turn them away at Homan Square, their clients materialize hours later at the nearby 11th district police station.

But Homan Square does not conduct detentions to punish crime or for pre-trial holding. Its holding cells and interview rooms – where interrogations occur – are “all the same thing”, Kilroy said.When police take arrested people to Homan Square, “the officers will take that person out of the vehicle and then walk them through a series of doors to a stairway, a secure stairway that leads directly up to the interview rooms”, Kilroy said.

Nichols, the officer in the research division, explained police taking arrestees to Homan Square in the context of interrogations. “Sometimes, especially Homan Square and detectives, they want to interview people to try to get more information, to try to turn evidence on their co-conspirators or other people, get more information on gangs and things like that,” Nichols said in deposition.

Once inside, very few people under arrest have any way to communicate with the outside world. Only two people, both white, have ever told the Guardian they have been able to make phone calls while detained at Homan Square, and both were from personal cellphones.

“We don’t have facilities for them to make pay phone calls from our – we’re not set up as a booking facility. We’re just a temporary holding facility,” Kilroy said.“We don’t have pay phones. On the rare occasion a person has been allowed to make a phone call on his or her personal cellphone number, but that is rare because it’s – if it’s part of an ongoing investigation we would never allow it. If the investigation was concluded, there was no risk to the conduct of a further investigation and a person says, listen, I just want to call my mom and let her know I’m OK, guys have done that, but it’s very difficult because we have very, very poor reception in that building. I lean back in my chair and my cellphone gets zero bars. I move forward and I can get a call.”

The US Department of Justice has opened an inquiry into the Chicago police department’s “patterns and practices”. In January, the Cook County board of commissioners, which oversees the county containing Chicago, voted to recommend the department investigate Homan Square.