Marc Freeman and ‘Stephanie’ detained for hours inside so-called ‘black site’ so they would confess and implicate others

The story of Marc Freeman’s disappearance inside Chicago’s Homan Square police warehouse on a marijuana offense last year exists between the lines of his arrest report – as his time in custody was not logged on the books until he surfaced at a police station seven hours after his arrest.

At 3.35pm on 22 October 2014, Chicago police arrested Freeman for possession of about two pounds of marijuana. From there, the police report states, Freeman was “transported to Homan for further processing”. The report specifies nothing about Freeman’s time at the secretive compound save for a seeming arrival at 4.10pm, only to note that he arrived in nearby district 11 lockup at 10.32pm.

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During the intervening hours, Freeman was lost to the outside world – denied, by police, any phone calls, attorney visits or a record of where he was. Shackled inside Homan Square, Freeman told the Guardian, as have 10 others, he was neither booked nor otherwise processed at a facility some have likened to the domestic equivalent of a CIA ‘black site’.



“Stephanie” encountered a similar circumstance in 2010. Even after police got all they needed from her, she recalled in interviews with the Guardian, they still cuffed her to a metal bar inside a cell at Homan Square for nearly half a day while other officers initially told her frantic siblings they didn’t know her whereabouts.



“I was so scared, I didn’t even know if I could see a lawyer. I assumed that wasn’t even an option, that whatever they say goes,” she said.



The 12-hour ordeal for Stephanie – who did not wish to speak on the record or use her real name for fear of jeopardizing her job prospects – took place after police found one ounce of marijuana in her car.



These two stories, four years apart, indicate how police units operating out of Homan Square hold people incommunicado for hours on non-violent marijuana offenses to get them to confess or implicate others. Freeman’s experience, just five months old, contradicts Chicago police assurances that all Homan Square detentions and interrogations are sufficiently documented – and reveals what a disappearance inside the police warehouse sounds like when translated into the bureaucratic language of an arrest report.



Illinois is among of a growing list of states experimenting with decriminalizing marijuana. The experiences of Freeman and Stephanie also highlight an aspect of policing in Chicago that the US justice department recently focused on in Ferguson, Missouri: the ability of police to legally confiscate money from arrestees.



Chicago police did not respond to questions for this story. The department has not responded to any factual query for a series of Guardian investigations over the last three weeks.

The police department asserted in a recent “factsheet” that “[m]ost individuals interviewed at Homan Square are lower-level arrests from the Narcotics unit. There are always records of anyone who is arrested by CPD, and this is no different at Homan Square.” In an earlier statement, police said: “If lawyers have a client detained at Homan Square, just like any other facility, they are allowed to speak to and visit them.”

But there wasn’t public documentation of Stephanie or Freeman’s time within Homan Square at the time of their detention, nor did they receive access to counsel. Freeman’s late 2014 case also casts doubt on police assurances to activists and lawyers in 2012 that quiet rules changes would eliminate civil-rights abuses at the warehouse – a place that activists, local politicians, attorneys and victims consider to be the intersection of historic, racialized police abuses and the post-9/11 militarization of law enforcement.



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Stephanie was never charged with a crime. Freeman ultimately was sentenced to probation for a misdemeanor. Both of them are white. The time spent in Homan Square was, for both, their first experience in police custody.

Stephanie and the ounce: ‘They never documented her, they stole her weed and they stole her cash’

The facility at Homan Square. Photograph: Chandler West/Guardian

Around noon on a July day in 2010, Stephanie, then 24 and a college student, remembers driving to her job as a nanny when an unmarked car pulled her over. A police officer instructed her to come with him, as she had about an ounce of marijuana on her.

“I guess they had been following me for some time,” she told the Guardian in a phone interview.

Stephanie says police took $700 in cash from her and cuffed her, without advising her of her rights, and drove her and her car to Homan Square.

Unlike the 10 other ex-Homan Square detainees the Guardian has interviewed, Stephanie says the Chicago police initially treated her with respect: officers at Homan Square uncuffed her, permitted her to call her job, and even took her along when they went for lunch at a taco place. Stephanie remembers that she was permitted her to call her sister, “Lisa” – but unable to specify where she was – and that an officer ended the call after 45 seconds when they began speaking a foreign language.

Officers took a harder line in her interrogation, Stephanie remembered, demanding her to implicate who sold her the ounce. Police, who had her cellphone, presented her with texts that referenced the transaction and a mugshot photo of her dealer. Yet the interrogation continued for another half hour.



As with previously reported Homan Square interrogations, the police wanted Stephanie “to confess and admit that yes, this was the person,” she told the Guardian. “Me admitting that this was the person [meant] that I could actually go out of there free with no record.”

No one had come for me all that time. I didn’t have my phone, nothing. I did start yelling, ‘Hello, hello?’ 'Stephanie'

Instead, Stephanie remembers being restrained in Homan Square, cuffed by her left wrist to a metal bar behind the bench she sat on. Officers told her the ordeal would last “just a couple of hours”, she said, presuming they were off to arrest her weed dealer. Stephanie did not see him at Homan Square and does not believe police took him there.

“After a few hours of being in there, maybe three or four hours, I started becoming very distressed,” she recalled. “No one had come for me all that time.”

As Stephanie’s time locked up dragged on, her siblings grew increasingly worried. Officers at three police stations said they did not know where she was, they said. Finally, one suggested that she might be at Homan, in custody of the drugs unit, and provided an address. But her brother says that all he saw when he got there was a “plain old warehouse building”, and figured police had given them the runaround.

By nightfall, an incensed Lisa told an officer at a nearby police station that she intended to file a missing persons report, and said “the media is gonna be in here” unless Stephanie was freed within a half an hour.

It was close to midnight, Stephanie remembers, when she was finally let go and taken to her car – without her cash. Nearly 12 hours had passed from her arrest. Despite the earlier police threats, she was never charged with any crime.

“What’s really complete bullshit is that they had her for such a long time, they didn’t process her, they took her to go get tacos with [them], but yet they never documented her, they stole her weed and they stole her cash,” said Lisa.

Stephanie is hardly the only person concerned about having their money seized during a Chicago drug arrest and never returned – a legal version of police theft known as asset forfeiture. A 2010 federal court ruling found that Chicago “does not adequately inform arrestees of the procedures to retrieve their money and thus does not comport with due process.” More recently, a Washington Post investigation found that Chicago police seized money some 638 times since 9/11, and supporting federal agencies permitted them to keep almost $8m of it. Outgoing US attorney general Eric Holder recently called for “a comprehensive review” of civil forfeiture.

“Police grab cash and it’s really a backward process,” said Chicago attorney Jonathan Brayman.

“They grab it and you have to go to court to show where it came from, that it came from a legitimate source. Even though the burden is formally on the state, it substantively kind of shifts the burden to the claimant.”

Marc Freeman and the snitch test: ‘We as citizens have to hold to the laws but the police do not’

Marc Freeman outside the site at Homan Square. Photograph: Chandler West/Guardian

Stephanie remembered thinking that requesting a lawyer at Homan Square would be futile. Four years later, Marc Freeman was asking for one from the start.

After the third time an officer attempted to interrogate Freeman at Homan Square, he says, the officer lost patience with Freeman’s requests for legal counsel and a phone call. “Really, what he said was: ‘You can ask for a lawyer all you want, you’re not getting one till tomorrow, motherfucker.’ He said it with a smile on his face,” Freeman remembered.

If the Chicago police are to be taken at their word, none of this should even be possible.

The “factsheet” the police issued on 1 March instructs: “Officers will create an Automated Arrest Report, which identifies the location of the arrestee … An individual who wishes to consult a lawyer will not be interrogated until they have an opportunity to do so.”

Additionally, activists and lawyers upset by their denial of access to Homan Square quietly met with police a few years ago to work out rules changes to permit them entry into the facility. After the police modified certain procedural directives called general orders in 2012, the coalition left the discussions believing they would now have access to the warehouse.

“The change in the general orders has not had the positive effect on the behavior of Chicago police department officers at Homan Square we wished for,” said Tracy Siska of the Chicago Justice Project, who was part of the coalition. “Clearly stronger steps need to be taken to intervene in this misconduct.”

Freeman said that he was neither booked, processed nor permitted to speak with anyone after police in ski masks burst into his home on October 22, much as they had in 2011 at the Paseo Boricua Grocery & Deli – a story detailed to the Guardian last week. They had warrants to search his place and to arrest him, all of which proceeded swiftly after they found a little under two pounds of weed and $4,591 cash.

Freeman, 28, said he had stopped selling marijuana months before the arrest, opting instead to consume it – particularly by cooking it into edibles, which can require substantial volumes of the drug. The cash, he said, came from a poker tournament, which is how Freeman said he largely earns his money.

“At no point was I ever read my rights or told what I was under arrest for,” he said.

Officers at Homan led Freeman upstairs, he said, then took him into a room and cuffed him to a bar attached to the wall by his left wrist. They appeared interested in turning him into a snitch.

“They wanted to me to set up my quote-unquote ‘sources.’ They wanted me to act as an informant. They wanted me to basically make [drug] purchases for them and put myself in harm’s way for them,” Freeman said.

The interrogation, Freeman estimates, ended after his third hour in custody. He says he didn’t see police for more than two more hours, when they transferred him to the 11th district station on West Harrison street for formal processing. He arrived there some seven hours after his arrest.

In February, Freeman accepted a plea deal: misdemeanor possession and two years of probation, out of jail. Despite the officer’s threat, Freeman is not a felon. But he never got his $4,591 in cash back from police.

“If what Mr Freeman charges is true, the officers engaged in serious violations of his civil rights,” said Craig Futterman of the University of Chicago Law School, who reviewed Freeman’s arrest report for the Guardian.

“He was held incommunicado in a police station, subject to interrogation, at a time when he was most vulnerable, without access to counsel despite his repeated requests. That is a black-letter constitutional and civil rights violation.”

In August 2013, then-Illinois governor Pat Quinn signed a bill legalizing marijuana for medicinal purposes. Illinois is currently rolling out a pilot program to implement limited legalization. It is among a growing number of American states that appear fatigued with using police resources for nonviolent marijuana offenses.

Freeman said his time at Homan Square “makes me not trust the police”.

“It really makes me feel like there’s a double standard, and that we as citizens have to hold to the laws but the police do not. If this keeps going unchecked, it’ll never go away.”