From Esquire

There seems to be little doubt that the city of Chicago-Rahm Emanuel, mayor-no longer can control its police department effectively. That was made clear with the release of a scathing report compiled by a special investigative task force commissioned by Emanuel last year in the wake of the shooting of Laquan McDonald, and subsequent cover-up, a cover-up in which Emanuel allegedly was involved.

C.P.D.'s own data gives validity to the widely held belief the police have no regard for the sanctity of life when it comes to people of color," the task force wrote. "Stopped without justification, verbally and physically abused, and in some instances arrested, and then detained without counsel - that is what we heard about over and over again." The report reinforces complaints made for decades by African-American residents who have said they were unfairly singled out by officers without justification on a regular basis, then ignored when they raised complaints…In a city where whites, blacks and Hispanics each make up about one-third of the population, 74 percent of the 404 people shot by the Chicago police between 2008 and 2015 were black, the report said. Black people were the subjects in 72 percent of the thousands of investigative street stops that did not lead to arrests during the summer of 2014. Three out of every four people on whom Chicago police officers tried to use Taser guns between 2012 and 2015 were black. And black drivers made up 46 percent of police traffic stops in 2013.

The release of the report comes during a time of renewed scrutiny of the facility at Homan Square where the CPD essentially ran its own equivalent of a CIA black site, complete with torture.

Sound familiar? This past year, in the shadow of the Laquan McDonald police shooting scandal, investigative reporters from The Guardian and their lawyers have exposed, in numerous articles, that Chicago's history of torture and cover-up is repeating itself, this time at Homan Square.

As the Guardian has documented, Homan Square, named after a notorious Chicago slumlord Samuel Homan, was, until recently, a secret site where thousands of people of color have been – and apparently still are – held and interrogated for hours, "off the books", often without being under arrest. They are handcuffed to a wall in dark and foreboding rooms and cells, with inconsistent access to food, drink or access to bathroom facilities. The Guardian's continuing investigation reveals that when this sensory deprivation does not yield sufficient cooperation, the police interrogators all too often employ physical brutality that meets the United Nations Convention Against Torture's definition of torture. Cases of tasering, which is a very real form of electric shock, suffocation, anal rape, beatings with batons, threats with a weapon and questionable deaths while in custody are now all on the public record. And, once again, we see police officers committing perjury and innocent victims being charged with crimes that they did not commit.

Homan Square is back in the news because of the case of Jaime Galvan, who died a decade ago while in custody at Homan Square under circumstances that are dubious at the very best.

A police spokeswoman claimed Galvan died "in his sleep after interviews at Harrison Area headquarters", the Chicago Tribune reported on 11 February 2006. However, on the official police hospitalization case report, obtained by the Guardian through a wide-ranging transparency lawsuit begun last year, the "address of occurrence" of Galvan's death was not Harrison area headquarters. It was 3340 W Fillmore Street – the secretive police warehouse complex otherwise known as Homan Square.

At this point, there is no compelling reason to believe anything the CPD says about its own conduct, and there won't be any reason to do so until the stables get thoroughly hosed down by someone from the outside. The Justice Department is said to be looking into the situation surrounding McDonald's death. But with the city's murder rate climbing, and these latest revelations, control of the CPD would be a political whipsaw even for a popular politician, which Emanuel is not. But there should be some sort of general consensus that you can protect innocent people without killing some of them. Otherwise, Chicago is nothing more than a deep-dish Mogadishu.