Rauner said Thursday he cried when he watched squad auto video of a white Chicago officer shooting a black 17-year-old in 2014.
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CHICAGO officials have released video footage from a nearby Burger King restaurant taken on the night a police officer fatally shot a black teenager, but it is missing the time period when the 2014 shooting occurred. According to the reports, Walsh shouted at McDonald, who Walsh claimed was advancing toward him and Van Dyke as they stood behind a Chevy Tahoe, to drop the knife several times. Amid an outcry after the city waited more than a year to release dash-cam footage of Officer Van Dyke shooting McDonald 16 times, Mayor Rahm Emanuel announced this week that he was setting up a special task force to examine, among other things, the city’s video-release policy. Multiple officers reported that even after McDonald was down, he kept trying to get up with the knife in his hand.
With aftershocks from the release of dashcam video showing McDonald’s shooting still rumbling through Chicago, a dashcam video of yet another fatal police shooting is about to be released. Van Dyke has now been charged with first-degree murder. The video, which Oppenheimer said he has seen many times, shows that within two seconds of getting out of his vehicle, Hernandez fired five times at Johnson as he was still running away, striking him in the back of the knee and again in the back of the shoulder.
“In defense of his life, Van Dyke backpedaled and fired his handgun at McDonald, to stop the attack”, one document reads, according to the Associated Press (AP). “McDonald fell to the ground but continued to move and continued to grasp the knife, refusing to let go of it”. The report shows Van Dyke’s partner backed up his account of what occurred. The statements led police supervisors to rule McDonald’s death a justifiable homicide.
This description of events doesn’t appear to match the dashcam video of the incident released by the city on November 24.
The report said Van Dyke was aware of the widely accepted teaching that an assailant armed with a knife was considered a deadly threat if within 21 feet.
The courts will ultimately decide the officer’s fate, but the public has a right to see the video.
After McDonald was killed, investigators with the Independent Police Review Authority visited the Burger King to look at their videos, and immediately asked about the gap in the footage.
Cook County State’s Attorney Anita Alvarez’s office will investigate the possibility of criminal charges against the officer, her office said Wednesday.
The release of the footage triggered protests and calls for public officials, including Mayor Rahm Emanuel, to resign.
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Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton and Illinois Attorney General Lisa Madigan are among those calling for an investigation by the U.S. Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division to determine whether the police department’s practices violate federal and constitutional law.
