The officer with the bodycam rushes forward as the victim is already surrounded by his colleagues, shoves the teenager’s head onto the ground and yanks his arms behind his back to put him in handcuffs with the help of an another officer. Police, citing surveillance footage, said O’Neal and three others were suspects in a string of auto thefts in the South Shore neighborhood.
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Soon after the July 28 shooting, Police superintendent Eddie Johnson stripped three of the officers of their police powers after a preliminary investigation concluded they had violated department policy. They were reportedly attempting to stop the auto he was driving – a vehicle police said was reported stolen from the suburb of Bolingbrook earlier that day. As the Jaguar squeezes between the first SUV and another parked auto, the driver of the first police vehicle exits. Two officers opened fire at O’Neal while he was still in the Jaguar, but he was not hit by those shots.
O’Neal, who had rammed a Chicago police squad vehicle just before he was killed, is black; several of the officers who opened fire that day are white.
O’Neal, who was unarmed at the time, was shot in the back, and no one was seen rendering any aid in the footage.
An officer can also be heard saying “They shot at us too right?”. “I don’t know who was shooting in the alley”.
An officer then shot at the vehicle O’Neal was in, firing a number of shots in a residential neighborhood and, at one point, in the direction of another officer. Another dashcam video captures the moment the stolen vehicle hits the squad auto.
The incident will go down as yet another black mark against the Chicago police department, whose officers have a history of disabling the audio of dashcam videos and torturing inmates, and whose officers have been under near-constant scrutiny for going on a year now, after video of a now-fired Chicago police officer shooting another teenager, Laquan McDonald, was released in November.
A body camera video from a police-involved shooting in Chicago has added yet another layer to the ongoing national conversation about policing.
Screenshot via Heavy.comPolice officers opened fire on a stolen Jaguar being driven by 18-year-old Paul O’Neal, according to video footage of the altercation released on Friday.
Michael Oppenheimer, an attorney for the family, charged that the officers had their own “street justice”.
Police spokesman Anthony Guglielmi said they were trying to determine why the body camera was not functioning, but said he did not believe it was deliberately turned off.
O’Neal’s family members were so distressed after watching the footage that they could not make a statement.
“I’m just exhausted of seeing us get killed”, Calloway said. “My promise to the people of Chicago is that we will be guided by the facts and should wrongdoing be discovered; individuals will be held accountable for their actions”, he said. As detailed in a recent Tribune investigation, IPRA has long conducted superficial investigations and recommended light punishments.
The dead teen’s family was so distraught after viewing videos at the Independent Police Review Authority headquarters that they left without making any public comment, their lawyer told reporters.
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Towards the end of the video, two officers in the video are seen giving one another a high-five.
