Angel Perez says the officers also threatened to also “go after” his family members, including his father who’s battling cancer. Angel Perez is now the 13th person to describe his detainment at the secret police site in Chicago to The Guardian. Like many prisoners, he apparently was never formally arrested, so he was neither booked, nor permitted access to an attorney, nor charged. Now Angel Perez and four others have filed a lawsuit against the Chicago Police Department seeking justice from the city.
Spencer Ackerman talking:
On October 21st, 2012, police, who had already contacted Perez the day before, sought to have him help them buy drugs in a controlled operation for a dealer that they believed Perez knew, who they had been monitoring. He went under his own free will to an agreed-upon meeting place, thinking that they would just basically have a quick conversation. They had asked him to get there to make sure, in their words, according to Perez, that his car wasn’t impounded. When he goes there, as surveillance camera footage from outside that lot that we’ve obtained and published shows, he extends his hand to the officers. He tries to go for a handshake. They turn him around on the car, they handcuff him, and they take him to Homan Square.
The video footage that we’ve published is, if not the first, extremely rare, footage from inside the facility that appear to show a more routinized detention operations apparatus than the Chicago police have said publicly in response to our reporting.
From there, when Perez demonstrates his reluctance to cooperate—he’s afraid, he doesn’t really want to be wrapped up in all of this, he’s worried about retaliation—the police start escalating things. According to Perez, they’re talking a lot about retaliation not just against him, but against his family, ways that they’ll plant evidence, not just on him, but on his family. They start getting, according to Perez, violent. One officer sits on his chest, starts pressing his palms into Perez’s eyes. He describes himself as experiencing this kind of aggression for the first time in his life. He’s freaked out. He’s panicking. They bend him over what he describes as metal detritus in the room near where he’s handcuffed, and they pull down his pants. They use a metal object. He says he feels the coldness and metallic aspect of it as they start tracing it down his back and saying some really vulgar and very racist things, in his telling, about what’s going to happen to him when African-American inmates in a jail in Cook County get a hold of him. They start saying that—if you’ll excuse the language—that he’s going to feel really like a “sexy bitch.” So they’re really using a lot of sexualized and homophobic insults at him as they’re doing this, again, according to Perez, at which point one of the officers allegedly uses this metal object to rectally penetrate him. He says it happens very quickly.
And afterwards, he immediately agreed to do whatever the police wanted him to do—in this case, make a controlled buy of $170 worth of heroin. That is one of the most shocking aspects, I think, of this case, that all of this happened not just for a man who police were not looking at, who never charged—who they never charged, who wasn’t implicated in the crime itself—and that would be no excuse, of course, even if he was, but nevertheless as a peripheral figure here, in order to compel him to make a $170 controlled purchase of heroin.
the officer said to him, “I almost blew your brains out.” leading Angel Perez to think that the object used to penetrate him was the barrel of a service revolver, of a gun.
in 2013, Perez filed his lawsuit initially, making the claim of the sexual abuse. What he didn’t know at that point, and would only come out later, was that all of this happened at Homan Square, the warehouse on Chicago’s West Side, home to Chicago narcotics units and some tactical units.
He didn’t know, because he was, in his telling, jostled in the car. Where he was going, he couldn’t really see. The cops were doing a kind of—a kind of wild ride. It sounded, in some cases, because he wasn’t shackled in, although it wasn’t a van, somewhat similar to the rough rides we’ve now heard about with Freddie Gray in Baltimore and other places. He wasn’t hurt during that ride nevertheless. He had also been taken to an actual police station nearby Homan Square at Harrison and Kedzie. So, initially, he just assumed he was back there. But they take him to this warehouse. They go through a kind of warren of different rooms, until he’s taken to the second floor at Homan and this happened to him.
Homan Square is a warehouse complex on Chicago’s West Side. It’s a secretive, but, as the Chicago police will like to point out ad nauseam, not secret, complex, where a lot of plainclothes operations happen. The vice squad is out of there. The narcotics unit is out of there. And it’s a place where we now have accounts from 17 people, 13 of whom I have personally interviewed, who, between 2005 and 2015, have been taken there, held incommunicado, meaning there’s no contemporaneously available to the public record of their whereabouts—no one knows where they are, in other words—hours shackled with no access to legal counsel, often while police try and pressure them in order to either become informants, provide them with drugs and, increasingly, from the stories that we’ve accumulated, provide them with guns.
John and Jose have described, in their case, being at a sandwich shop in Chicago a couple years ago, when masked police busted in and arrested both customers there, arrested kitchen staff there, took them to Homan Square, tried to, again, shake them down as they’re all shackled, some of them shackled to each other and then shackled to a bar in this sort of cage-like holding area, in order to see about a narcotics arrest.
In the case of John Vergara and Jose Garcia, John Vergara starts saying to the officers that he knows a civil rights attorney, and he’s going to contact that attorney and let people know what’s happening inside Homan Square. The cops made a deal with him. They say, “We will let you out”—this is after several hours of being detained and not being able to access, you know, phone—being denied phone calls, not being able to call their families, not being able to call their lawyers, anyone. And then, ultimately, the cops make a deal with him, and they say, “If you don’t tell this lawyer or anyone else, we’ll let you go right now.” And that’s ultimately what happened.
“Dead man walking.” A lot of intimidation moves by police to make people feel like they’re entirely under the control of their police captors.
Calvin Coffey. So just in February, basically, less than three weeks before we published our first story from inside Homan Square, according to the lawsuit that he joined, which Angel Perez recently refiled, he was picked up for narcotics or for some sort of—it’s unclear—drugs delivery issue. But he’s just picked up off the street. He’s taken to Homan Square. He’s confined for a long period of time without a bathroom break. He ultimately, while he’s held there for a long period of time, has to answer a call of nature, defecates on the floor of where he’s shackled. Police allegedly make him clean up his own feces with his skull cap.
With Angel Perez, there’s a legacy here of not just police abuse, but sexualized police abuse in Chicago. Darrell Cannon, a man who in 1983 was coerced into falsely confessing for a murder that would have landed him on—that landed him on death row and would have had him be executed, if Illinois’s governor, George Ryan, hadn’t cleared out death row, had a gun, a shotgun barrel shoved in his mouth. It was empty, but police pulled the trigger three times. That got him to falsely confess to a murder. It sounded very reminiscent to me of what Angel Perez went through, again, allegedly, in 2012. So, over—basically, three decades later, this continued.
They’ve admitted Homan Square exists. They continue their nonspecific denials. And now, at this point, they don’t even respond to my questions when I ask them. They don’t even acknowledge receipt of my emails. But in a supposed fact sheet that they put out on March 1st to attempt to refute some of my reporting, they took great umbrage at the suggestion that anyone would be physically abused. They acted as if that has never happened in Chicago, that there’s no history there, there’s no legacy there.
— source democracynow.org
Spencer Ackerman, national security editor at The Guardian.