Detainees, legal advocates and activists testified on Tuesday at the first public hearing to examine Homan Square, the Chicago police interrogation facility exposed by the Guardian and falling under renewed scrutiny amid intense examination of the city’s law enforcement officials.

Homan Square: Chicago police chief's downfall prompts calls to shutter facility Read more

As protests continue to grip Chicago following the release of video footage and a landmark investigation by the US Justice Department, police practices at the warehouse received a rare political convening at city hall, which has all but dismissed public comment – despite an ongoing Guardian investigation revealing at least 7,000 people held off-the-books there.

“It’s fallen to us to shine a light on dark places,” said the Cook County commissioner, Richard Boykin, who convened the group under the board’s human relations commission. “Homan Square is such a place.”

Boykin called for the extended inquiry hours after the city’s police chief was fired by the mayor this month, following protests in the wake of details about the death of a black teenager shot 16 times by a white police officer. Less than one week later, the nation’s top law enforcement agency said it had begun an inquiry into the patterns and practices of the city’s notoriously brutal police.

“The Justice Department’s investigation must take into account those systemic issues in the Chicago police department that go back decades,” Boykin said on Tuesday. “Homan Square is one of those systemic issues.”

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At a press conference announcing the federal inquiry into the department, the US attorney general, Loretta Lynch, told the Guardian the “extremely important” issues at Homan Square would not be involved in her department’s inquiry to begin but that “we always reserve the right to expand it”.

Police department officials were invited to attend Tuesday’s hearing of the county commissioners. But seven people who were either detained or involved in exposing the detentions testified instead, for more than an hour of answers meant to push the city closer toward shuttering the west side facility.

Flint Taylor, the longtime civil rights attorney who helped press for a landmark reparations ordinance earlier this year and whose clients are suing the city for unconstitutional “widespread and interrelated Chicago police department patterns and practices” at Homan Square, gave a testimonial in front of the commission and sizable crowd of citizens who watched.

“Some of the activities in Homan Square fit into the definition of torture, internationally, under the UN’s definition,” Taylor said, “and Homan Square needs to be looked at under that light.”

He argued that allegations logged in lawsuits and a series of Guardian articles fit into a long history of police practices stemming from the police detective Jon Burge, who who tortured more than 200 Chicago citizens who were in police custody across two decades.

“I want to try and prevent anyone else to go through this situation,” said Kory Wright, who says he was held incommunicado at Homan Square and spoke out publicly for the first time since his February interview with the Guardian’s national security editor, Spencer Ackerman, who also testified at the hearing.

“It’s easy to assume we’re up to no good,” Wright said, referencing other poor, black people in his neighborhood who he says are targeted by Chicago police.

The hearing’s testimonies are now public record, which Boykin said he hoped would keep pressure on Washington to include Homan Square in the Justice Department’s investigation, since he had little faith that the mayor’s office would shut the site by itself.

“When we allow for people’s rights to be violated,” Boykin said, “we basically erode them as individuals.

“They feel like less of a citizen of America, and it erodes America in the process.”