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Eugene

(61,900 posts)
Wed Apr 13, 2016, 12:06 PM Apr 2016

Chicago policing taskforce calls black distrust of department 'justified'

Source: The Guardian

Chicago policing taskforce calls black distrust of department 'justified'

Leaked draft report does not mention Homan Square but condemns
police practices in use at the secret interrogation facility and calls for
several reforms


Zach Stafford in Chicago and Lois Beckett and Spencer Ackerman in New York
Wednesday 13 April 2016 16.42 BST

A draft report from a taskforce on policing handpicked by the embattled Chicago mayor, Rahm Emanuel, says that black distrust of the Chicago police is “justified”, it has emerged, as Chicagoans outraged by the police shooting of a 16-year-old took their anger to the warehouse exposed by the Guardian as an incommunicado detentions and interrogations center.

Meanwhile a local politician expressed optimism that a separate US Justice Department investigation into policing in the city would be expanded to include Homan Square, the police warehouse complex that police-reform advocates have likened to a CIA black site.

The draft report from the Chicago policing taskforce, scheduled to be published as early as this week and leaked to the Chicago Tribune, does not mention Homan Square. Yet it calls on police to abandon practices both in use at the facility and which keep it in operation for interrogations and detentions.

Its recommendations include the “adoption of a Citywide protocol allowing arrestees to make phone calls to an attorney and/or family member(s) within one hour of arrest”. Sworn depositions of CPD officers by Guardian attorneys confirm that there are no pay phones inside Homan Square.

It called on the police to “be more transparent” about arrest data; to implement a “citywide ‘know your rights’ training for youth”; to abolish the “code of silence” protecting police from accountability; and to disband the “badly broken” review body that police have said in public statements investigates police-brutality allegations at Homan Square and beyond.

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Read more: http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/apr/13/chicago-policing-taskforce-black-distrust-justified
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