US congressman and Cook County commissioner hand-deliver letter to Eric Holder and demand an ‘immediate investigation’ into secretive police facility

This article is more than 5 years old

This article is more than 5 years old

A day after the Guardian exposed the first in a series of allegations of incommunicado detention and abuse at the Chicago police facility known as Homan Square, Cook County commissioner Richard Boykin sent a letter to the US Department of Justice. Citing what he likened to “CIA or Gestapo tactics”, Boykin joined officials and human-rights groups from the nation’s capital to the west side of Chicago in calling for a federal investigation into the secretive site.

In the three weeks since, Boykin has taken an “eerily quiet” police-guided tour of the compound, as protesters well beyond Chicago call for formal inspections and a full-on shutdown, and Mayor Rahm Emanuel and the police department remain in denial ahead of a runoff election next month. Nor has there been a peep from the feds.

So on Wednesday, Boykin and US congressman Danny Davis found themselves walking into the justice department in Washington, acting under a new unofficial capacity: mailmen.

The duo hand-delivered pleas to the attorney general, Eric Holder, for “an immediate investigation” into Homan Square, and suggested that off-the-books interrogation may be a lever for long-sought justice on Chicago police abuse – and that questions over the secretive facility will not go unanswered.

“We fully expect to get a reply,” Boykin told the Guardian, minutes after re-delivering his February letter to a special assistant with the DoJ’s civil-rights division – the same unit that oversaw this month’s damning investigation into policing problems in Ferguson, Missouri.

The justice department did not respond to a request for comment on Wednesday, but Boykin said he was assured that Holder would see the letters before he left office. (Holder’s successor, Loretta Lynch, could receive a long-delayed confirmation vote as soon as next week.)

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Davis, a Democrat who represents the neighborhood that includes the Homan Square site, had until Wednesday only said publicly that he would “strongly support” a federal inquiry into what 11 detainees – in strikingly similar detailed accounts provided to the Guardian – have described as extended interrogation without access to legal counsel or their families, often while shackled.

Now an acting congressman has crossed the threshold to the nation’s highest law-enforcement officer.

“I had hoped that we were making more progress than maybe is being made,” Davis told the Guardian in an interview Wednesday night, “but I think the verdict is still out.”

The two politicians said they hoped their visit – and a potential new inquiry – would provide a wider lens on patterns of abuse inside the Chicago police department, which has led to millions in taxpayer-funded civil-rights settlements and a reparations movement that long predates demonstrations centered on Homan Square.

“I think once you begin an investigation in Chicago, the fear is it will lead to others,” Boykin said.

Citing its work that dates back to a 2013 reparations ordinance linked to torture by the notorious police officer Jon Burge, the human rights group Amnesty International sent its own letter about Homan Square Wednesday to the justice department official behind the damning Ferguson inquiry.

Amnesty International USA’s executive director, Steven Hawkins, called for “a prompt, thorough, independent and impartial investigation” in the letter, which he noted was a follow-up after receiving no response to a separate call on Emanuel in February.

Emanuel, a former chief of staff to Barack Obama who is facing the prospect of a dead-heat runoff election on 7 April, has only addressed the Homan Square allegations during comments in a brief television interview.

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“We follow all the rules,” Emanuel said in February, despite numerous victims whose accounts seem to contradict the police department’s own denials that officers may have broken guidelines at the holding facility.

In an interview published last week, Emanuel’s runoff challenger, Jesús “Chuy” García, said he was investigating questions about Homan Square independently. “I call on Mayor Emanuel to answer those questions,” García said in another interview.

The controversy was not raised at the candidates’ first head-to-head debate in Chicago on Monday, but it was not going ignored in Washington.

“The Guardian news article has generated a great deal of community concern, and many people are wondering whether of not the reported allegations are true,” Davis wrote to Holder on Wednesday. “[I]f so, there will be a negative impact on creating positive relationships between the Chicago police department and the community.”