This building looks innocent enough. But those familiar with the secretive interrogation and holding facility describe a shocking display of police abuses

From the outside, you have to concentrate to realize Homan Square is a police facility. At first glance, it’s an unremarkable red brick warehouse, one of a handful on Chicago’s west side that used to belong to Sears Roebuck, complete with roll-up aluminum doors. No prominent signage tells outsiders it belongs to the police. The complex sits amidst fixtures in a struggling neighborhood: a medical clinic, takeout places, a movie theater, a charter school.

But a look at what surrounds the warehouse gives clearer indications of Homan Square’s police business. The yellow barrier for cars at the street checkpoint. The vans in the motor pool marked Chicago Police Forensic Services parked next to the unmarked cars. The black-and-white checkered door to match the signature pattern on Chicago police hats. The floodlights on the roof. The guy with a gun walking outside and smoking a cigarette in a black windbreaker with POLICE written on the back.

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“It’s not really a secret location, but it’s kind of a cloistered location,” said Richard Brzeczek, a former Chicago police superintendent.

Police on site, at the intersection of West Fillmore Street and South Homan Avenue, refused the Guardian access to Homan Square on a frigid recent morning.

Lawyers who seek access to Homan Square are typically turned away. But interviews with ex-cops, the few attorneys granted a measure of access, and one person who was detained inside for nearly an entire day describe an unusual, secretive police compound, complete with armored vehicles, surveillance gear and places to hold people for interrogation.

Brian Jacob Church was taken to Homan Square after police picked him up in 2012 on terrorism charges he beat at trial. He said police first photographed him for a biometrics database, took him down a long cinderblock hallway on a second floor, and handcuffed him to a bench bolted to the floor. He spent the next 17 hours there – approximately, as it was a windowless room and the lights were kept on overhead – while police attempted an interrogation he described as a fishing expedition.

Homan Square struck Church as the police equivalent of a CIA black site. Inside, he saw “big, big vehicles” that looked to him like the Mine Resistant Ambush Protected used by US soldiers and marines in Iraq and Afghanistan. When his lawyers were finally permitted access, Church spoke with them through a 12ft x 12ft metal cage.



Church isn’t the only one who saw cages at Homan Square. Brzeczek, Chicago’s top cop from 1980 to 1983, said they’re chain-link metal cages stretching from floor to ceiling, “much like going into, say, a factory where there are certain areas that are secure”.



Brzeczek said that he visited Homan Square around early 2010 to visit the property room. While he said he didn’t see anyone detained, Brzeczek said that if police were to “put people in a subcomponent of that building, it would most probably be a cage.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest ‘What sticks out the most in my mind is the amount of armored vehicles they had in their garage just sitting there,’ Brian Jacob Church told the Guardian. ‘Big vehicles – like the very large MRAPs that they use in the Middle East.’ Photograph: Chandler West/Guardian

Matthew Dodge, the attorney who came to see Church, said the latticework through which he spoke to his client was smaller than a typical backyard fence. Inside the cage was nothing: “Just a floor and a cage.” Before entering Homan Square he had to leave his cellphone behind. The police he saw inside were all plainclothed.

Interrogations aren’t the only thing that happen in Homan Square. It’s a headquarters for a number of special police units, including the anti-gang, anti-vice and bomb and arson squad. Published reports describe a surveillance “wire room” inside. It also features evidence and recovered-property storage, something begun at the secure facility in 2003 after a Chicago police officer stole 49 kilos of cocaine from an evidence locker at the Cook County Criminal Courts Building.

Over the years Homan Square has formed a backdrop for high-profile drug seizures, where Chicago officials or cops display cocaine, marijuana and guns taken off the street. The rock group Portugal.The Man reportedly sent Homan Square detectives three dozen doughnuts – plus croissants and danishes – in gratitude for helping the band recover stolen music equipment.

But its interrogations function is less well known, even to close observers of Chicago police. A statement provided to the Guardian by police after this story was published claimed “there are always records of anyone who is arrested by CPD, and this is not any different at Homan Square,” and that lawyers “are allowed to speak to and visit” clients there.

However, Anthony Hill, an attorney, said he once made it into Homan Square – to the surprise of police. He said he saw “four, five cells,” describing it as a “bare-bones police station”.

“When I got in, they were so shocked I was there they didn’t know what to do with me,” he said.

