The secretive Chicago police facility exposed by the Guardian will fall under sworn public testimony for the first time in the wake of a forced resignation by the city’s police chief amid a scandal over the shooting of a black teenager.
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It was a sudden shift for Emanuel, who had brought McCarthy to Chicago more than four years ago and had expressed confidence in his work as recently as last week.
On Tuesday afternoon, Illinois Attorney General Lisa Madigan said she had written a letter to US Attorney General Loretta Lynch asking the federal Justice Department to conduct a civil rights investigation into the Police Department’s use of “deadly force; the adequacy of its review and investigation of officers’ use of force and investigation of allegations of misconduct”. Tensions heightened after the video showed Van Dyke shooting McDonald 16 times after the teenager walked away from him.
But for many Chicagoans, the story of McDonald’s death held an all-too-familiar set of circumstances: City Hall initially casts the incident as an act of police self-defense only for the facts to bear out a different story later.
Today, McCarthy was released from his role when Mayor Emanuel request his resignation.
Chief of Detectives John Escalante is to serve as interim chief.
Others, while stopping short of demanding the mayor resign, have called for Emanuel to do something about the “reforms he says he’ll make”.
“This is not the end of the problem, but it’s the beginning to the solution of the problem”, said Emanuel.
He has a tough job ahead of him as Emanuel’s determined to rebuild the trust between the police and the community.
The video was only released after an order from a judge 13 months after the shooting.
McCarthy appeared on NBC Chicago Tuesday morning where he admitted that the initial press release on McDonald’s shooting was “mistaken” but added that there was little he could do once a federal investigation was launched. Van Dyke, who is the only officer to fire his weapon, continued to shoot. “When I learned the circumstances of Mr. McDonald’s life – that he was a ward of the state at the time – and the troubles that he had had growing up, I thought that the whole thing was a tragedy”, McCarthy said. Protesters called for the immediate punishment of McCarthy, Mayor Emanuel and Cook County States Attorney Anita Alvarez for the murder and the cover-up of the crime.
Laquan McDonald was brutally gunned down by Chicago Police Officer Jason Van Dyke all the way back on October 20 of 2014. He did not, however, mirror the path of his predecessors by rising through the ranks of the Chicago Police Department to assume the superintendent position.
Instead of releasing evidence sooner, Emanuel took measures to prevent the video from being released.
The police superintendent “is not going to be the only one”, Lee said.
The family of Johnson has repeated their demand that the city release dashboard camera video of the shooting, a week after authorities released video of the shooting death of McDonald.
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Despite Obama’s close relationship with the mayor, there is meant to be a firewall between the White House and investigators in the Justice Department when it comes to criminal probes.
