The frustrated politicians who called for a federal investigation into Chicago’s off-the-books police warehouse have renewed calls for the first official inquiry into the facility, as a direct response to what one of them called a “shocking” new exposé of wholesale detentions.

Chicago police detained thousands of black Americans at interrogation facility Read more

Another said the lack of response in Washington had led him to “question the integrity” of the Justice Department.

Danny Davis, the US congressman who represents the home district of Homan Square, said he would personally seek a meeting with police superintendent Garry McCarthy to learn the “rationale” for a practice – stretching back at least a decade – of holding Americans without a public record of their whereabouts or access to a lawyer while interrogating them at the police site, known as Homan Square.



“It’s hard to imagine and it’s just as difficult to understand the rationale for this kind of action,” Davis, the longtime Democratic representative of Chicago’s West Side, said late on Wednesday.

“I think a city council hearing would be the best place ... [for] an official oversight look at what is being done.”

Davis said he would talk to members of the Chicago city council to press them for what would be the first proper examination of Homan Square since the Guardian revealed its usage for detentions and interrogations in February.

On Wednesday, the Guardian revealed the initial results of a transparency lawsuit it filed to uncover the extent of Homan Square’s emergence as what ex-detainees, lawyers and activists describe as the domestic equivalent of a CIA black site.

The lawsuit compelled the Chicago police to disclose that over 3,500 people – 82% of whom a Guardian independent investigation found to be black – have been subject to detention at Homan Square, with only three documented visits from lawyers to the building since September 2004. (The Guardian was able to compile eight other incidences in which lawyers at the very least knew their clients were held at Homan Square.)

Neither the Chicago police nor the office of Mayor Rahm Emanuel, whose administration has presided over at least 2,522 of the detentions, responded to requests for comment before or after the Guardian published the cache of Homan Square files on Wednesday. Both have insisted there is nothing untoward about the warehouse.

Davis has in the past several months attempted to compel transparency and oversight into Homan Square. In March, he and Cook County commissioner Richard Boykin personally delivered a letter to then-attorney general Eric Holder requesting a US Justice Department inquiry.

Responding to the new Guardian revelations, Boykin said: “What is happening at Homan Square is symptomatic of what is taking place across the country, in regards to our law enforcement.”

“This hands-off approach brings into question the integrity of the justice department and whether or not they can be fair,” he told the Guardian on Thursday. “I think they have failed the citizens of Chicago, especially those who have been arrested and rounded up.”

But the county commissioner remained confident that the justice department in Washington could do more than the Chicago police department would to reform itself, or Emanuel to speak out more than his brief statement that the police “follow all the rules”.

“I don’t think we can expect the local forces here – and that is Mayor Emmanuel and Chief McCarthy – to do anything about this,” he continued. “That is like asking the fox to guard the chickens.”

The Justice Department has continued not to respond to the Guardian’s request for comment about any potential federal inquiries, despite calls for action from former members of its civil rights division.

Davis cited the troubled racial history of Chicago to pronounce himself disturbed but not surprised by the racial disproportionality of black detainees at Homan Square.

Long-time Chicago civil rights lawyers also responded to the Guardian’s lawsuit against the police as the “extremely troubled” results of a city with a “fundamentally racist” history of law enforcement.

“Police assassination of Black Panther leaders, the torture of scores of African American suspects, the police ‘red squad’ spying indiscriminately on black citizens, and now Homan Square,” said attorney Flint Taylor, who played a major role in pushing the city to creating a reparations fund earlier this year.

Chicago is only 33% black, but more than four out of every five detainees at Homan Square – a facility that takes in detainees from around the city, unlike a typical police station – have thus far been revealed to be black.

“We’ve always known that there was disparate treatment. The extent and how much, that becomes another part of the question. But the fact is that it goes on and needs to be revealed,” Davis said, referencing the rising tide of anger at racialized police abuse that has swept the US in the year since a white police officer shot and killed a black teenager in Ferguson, Missouri, and was ultimately exonerated.

“The revelations that you are pointing out are indeed shocking in the city of Chicago,” Davis said. “It helps one to know that ... especially minority communities, African Americans, feel with justification that we do not receive equal protection under the law, nor equal justice in our country. Those are indeed bones of contention and they will not go away. The feeling about it will not change unless something is actually done.”