Small groups of demonstrators gathered again Wednesday to protest the death of a black teen shot by a white police officer, and they urged supporters to join them in trying to shut down Chicago’s famous Michigan Avenue shopping district during the Black Friday shopping bonanza.
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Although the protests hampered traffic along one of the city’s busiest thoroughfares during one of the busiest shopping days of the year, some expressed support for the protests.
Johnny Reed, 24, a Chicago native now living in Washington, D.C., said he was back in town for the holidays and “supporting home”.
In the seven years between 2008 and 2014, seventy-four percent of people shot by police in Chicago were black. The movement in Chicago has increasingly called for CPAC to establish community control of the police. We entrust police with power and responsibility, and honor them for the risks they take every time they put on their uniforms. “The fact is that the police department, according to the lawyers for Laquan McDonald, shooed witnesses away or berated them for saying that they saw an execution”.
The teenager did not speak to any of the officers or respond to commands to drop the knife.
One family, downtown from suburban Woodstock, Ill., to tend to their ill son at nearby Northwestern Memorial Hospital, stood on the curb and took pictures as if they were watching a parade. He punctured a tire and damaged the front windshield of one of the police cars.
Jackson, president of the Chicago-based Rainbow PUSH Coalition, noted how the city opposed the release of the video until a judge finally ordered its release under a reporter’s Freedom of Information Act request.
The shooting happened just two and a half months after the events in Ferguson, Missouri, which sparked riots around the nation and led to increased interest in the Black Lives Matter campaign.
The shooting occurred just two weeks before Emanuel was facing a tight re-election race. Sixteen shots is excessive. It shows McDonald jogging down a street and then veering away from Van Dyke and another officer who emerge from a police SUV drawing their guns. On Tuesday, Van Dyke was charged with first-degree murder, the Chicago Tribune reports. McDonald spins around and falls to the pavement as Van Dyke keeps shooting. The period includes scores of police killings and 20 dismissed complaints alleging bias, violence and illegal searches by Van Dyke. Van Dyke’s partner told investigators he had to stop the officer from reloading.
“A police officer sees that video and has a different mindset than the rest of the people out there”. Another perspective from a different squad auto less than a minute later shows McDonald on the ground after he had been shot 16 times. He was simply left for dead in the middle of the street.
Van Dyke has since been charged with first-degree murder, however, activists continue to rally against these unwarranted and brutal deaths (and covering up of these deaths) at the hands of those in power against a black minority. His path to the presidency owes much to Chicago, and he remains close to the municipal leadership: Rahm Emanuel, Obama’s first chief of staff, assumed the city’s mayoral mantel in 2011.
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“Alvarez insists that her decision to charge Van Dyke was not “dictated” by the release of the video, but that it did “[move] up the timing”. Alvarez knew of its content and with that could have pressed charges if not immediately after LaQuan’s murder, certainly sooner than 400 days later.
