The October 20, 2014, shooting of 17-year-old Laquan McDonald was captured on a squad car’s dashcam, and a judge has given the city until the end of Wednesday to release it publicly. A spokeswoman for the Cook County State’s Attorney’s office could not immediately be reached for comment.
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A police dash-cam video, due to be released to the public on Wednesday on a judge’s order, purportedly shows McDonald walking away from police when the officer opens fire after stepping out of his squad auto.
But some said after the meeting that city officials waited too long to get them involved – more than a year after McDonald was shot.
Van Dyke has been the subject of 18 complaints ranging from using racial epithets to excessive force to illegally arresting people, according to personnel records obtained by the Invisible Institute, a police-accountability nonprofit.
“Police officers are entrusted to uphold the law, and to provide safety to our residents”, Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s office said in a statement. The video shows him moving away from police at the time he was shot, said a lawyer for McDonald’s mother, who has seen the video.
He said the shooting lasted 14 to 15 seconds and that McDonald was on the ground for 13 of those seconds.
But while Laquan McDonald was black and the officer who shot him is white, what happened in Chicago differs from what happened in Ferguson in a few key ways.
In Minnesota on Tuesday, police were searching for three white men in the shooting of five people near a Minneapolis police station where demonstrators have gathered for more than a week to protest the shooting of an unarmed black man by officers. An autopsy later revealed that McDonald had been shot 16 times, in different places all over his body. For months, the city has fought attempts to have the video released to the public, saying it could jeopardize any ongoing investigation.
Acree also said protests were to be expected, adding, “If there were no protests, that would mean we had become immune to these matters”.
“Many in my community feel betrayed, many are so very angry and protests are imminent, and from the meeting today it’s very clear that Mayor Emanuel knows that”, Reverend Ira Acree, a pastor present at the city hall meeting with ministers, told the Tribune. Van Dyke, a 14-year veteran, has been stripped of his police powers, pending investigations by federal and Cook County prosecutors.
Van Dyke has said through his lawyer and the police union that he felt under threat from McDonald.
“We must try to keep this thing as calm as possible, but when the Chicago police take and slaughter a 17-year-old child, you have upset our community”, said Mark Carter, a community activist with the group ONE Chicago.
Van Dyke confronted him knowing that McDonald had “punctured a tire on a police vehicle”, according to his attorney.
The official says Officer Jason Van Dyke is expected to be charged Tuesday.
Dean Angelo, the president of the Chicago Fraternal Order of Police, told CNN affiliate WBBM he is concerned protesters from outside the city may converge to “disrupt and cause problems”.
They also revealed that PCP, a hallucinogenic drug, was in the teenager’s system at the time.
‘They had the opportunity to be a good example and a model across the country on how to improve police and community relations and they missed it, ‘ Acree said.
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Details of the video did not begin to surface until April, when the city made the unusual decision to approve the settlement for McDonald’s family even before a lawsuit had been filed.
