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

Garry McCarthy forced to resign over video of black teenager’s death, but
politicians and activists say hearing on off-the-books ‘black site’ must follow

Nicky Woolf in New York and Kevin Gosztola in Chicago
Tuesday 1 December 2015 21.46 GMT

A secretive Chicago police facility will fall under sworn public testimony for the first time in the wake of a forced resignation by the city’s police chief amid a scandal over the shooting of a black teenager.

The renewed scrutiny of Homan Square – an interrogation warehouse exposed by the Guardian that has been described as the equivalent of a CIA “black site” and now a “torture chamber” – was immediate, stretching from national activists and the local Black Lives Matter chapter to an Illinois politician who planned to announce on Tuesday an official hearing into the site as a direct result of the firing.

“The murder of Laquan McDonald and the attempted cover-up of that murder over a period of 13 months casts even more doubt on the repeated police denials of wrongdoing at Homan Square,” Cook County commissioner Richard Boykin said in a statement provided to the Guardian.

“As recent events have shown, when left to its own devices, the Chicago police department will revert to a culture that suppresses wrongdoing and protects wrongdoers,” added Boykin. He has repeatedly pressed Barack Obama’s administration to examine a facility where his former chief aide and Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel has said his police “follow all the rules” – despite more than 20 people who have come forward with claims of unconstitutional abuse and detention.

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