Politicians, civil liberties groups and Black Lives Matter activists have renewed demands for an “immediate investigation” by the Obama administration into Homan Square, citing a “cop-out” from the Chicago mayor, Rahm Emanuel – and a new report by the Guardian – amid calls to shut down a Chicago police detention facility they insist is unconstitutional at its core.



Less than one day after the Guardian revealed that 7,185 arrestees had been detained at Homan Square over nearly 11 years with only 68 documented lawyer visits, the Illinois politician who represents the district housing Homan Square wrote to the US attorney general, insisting that that “further extensive investigative reporting by the Guardian” had forced him to request an expedited federal inquiry by the Justice Department.

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“This reported pattern suggests that the Homan Square facility exists primarily for the purpose of housing off-the-books detentions and interrogations without the knowledge of or access to counsel,” Cook County commissioner Richard Boykin wrote to Loretta Lynch on Tuesday. “If accounts of the activity taking place at Homan Square are correct, then the very existence of the facility is unconstitutional, and the civil rights violations that take place there, are numerous and ongoing.”

A spokesman for the American Civil Liberties Union of Illinois echoed that demand, saying the Guardian’s reporting merited “a full investigation … whether in court or by the Department of Justice”.

As plans took shape to protest the nation’s largest conference of police in Chicago this weekend, activists associated with Black Lives Matter went a step further, saying they would renew demands to close Homan Square and “that all people responsible for its operating be investigated for crimes against humanity, including the mayor”.

Protests against the secretive police warehouse followed the Guardian’s initial Homan exposé in February, after which Boykin and US congressman Danny Davis hand-delivered their request for a federal inquiry to the office of the then attorney general Eric Holder.

The Justice Department did not respond to multiple requests for comment about the new demand from Boykin, who said he was “disturbed” by the “egregious” revelations inside a Guardian transparency lawsuit, which offered the most full-scale picture yet of thousands of racially disproportionate detentions and limited access to legal counsel.

“I don’t want to say the department is overwhelmed with Ferguson, Baltimore or other things, because I think they have the manpower to do an investigation,” Boykin told the Guardian. “So I don’t know if they are protecting the mayor, who used to be the chief of staff to the president, or they don’t want to be embarrassed by Homan Square, which happens to be [in] the president’s hometown.”

Mayor Emanuel has come under increased scrutiny for his defense of policing practices amid increased gun violence in the city. Commenting on the rise of bystander and body-camera footage of police brutality in the year since Michael Brown was killed in Ferguson, Missouri, he was quoted this month as saying: “We have allowed our police department to get fetal and it is having a direct consequence.”

Emanuel has not commented on the Homan Square allegations other than a brief television interview in which he said “we follow all the rules”. Boykin called the combination of remarks “a cop-out”.

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Activists and civil rights leaders have grown increasingly frustrated with a wider “code of silence” around Chicago policing, as three men who allege being “physically and psychologically” abused at Homan Square put it in a federal lawsuit filed against the city on Monday.

Boykin said he would also request an emergency hearing next week for Homan Square detainees to speak before the city council, whose black caucus last month called for the firing of police superintendent Garry McCarthy.

McCarthy, who has been in Washington with a coalition of law enforcement leaders responding to the recommendations of Barack Obama’s taskforce on policing that was appointed in the wake of the Ferguson protests, will host some 15,000 attendees at the International Association of Chiefs of Police Conference.

Obama and Lynch are expected to speak at the gathering on Tuesday, but activists from the Chicago chapter of Black Lives Matter said they would make Homan Square a focus of their march on Saturday, from police headquarters to the conference’s opening events.

“The atrocities against humanity that are occurring at Homan Square will go down in history as a lesson of consequence reaped from the absence of a system of police accountability,” Aislinn Sol, an organizer with Black Lives Matter Chicago, told the Guardian on Wednesday.

“We demand that all people responsible for its operating be investigated for crimes against humanity,” she said, “including the mayor.”