Officers chase him down a driveway between brick houses and over wooden fences. A few seconds later, multiple shots are heard.
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“Get down! Hands behind your back!” “You can expect that we will be open, we will be honest about what we discover”. An officer holds his foot on O’Neal’s leg. The nine clips, some of which were from police body cameras, show police officers firing several rounds at a fleeing stolen Jaguar after it nearly hits one of the cop vehicles. Police said they are investigating whether the body camera worn by the officer who fatally shot O’Neal malfunctioned or was turned off. The teen, police learned, was not armed.
The head of the Independent Police Review Authority, the body charged with probing Chicago police misconduct, called the footage of the O’Neal shooting “shocking and disturbing”. The O’Neal family is suing the Chicago PD.
“They can only take so much”, he said. He noted that it had started working immediately afterwards.
“This goes down to training on race, this goes down to training on the community”, Attorney Michael Oppenheimer, who has sued the department on behalf of the O’Neal family, told The Chicago Tribune. He praised the relatively early release of the videos but called for a special prosecutor. “I think I shot that motherf_, man”, one officer can be heard to say.
O’Neal’s sister, Briana Adams, broke down during a news conference.
“.We have taken major steps to improve training, tactics and policies”, he said. “Paul had goals. He was loved by my mother, his family and me”. He had been suspected of stealing a auto. Police say they shot and killed an 18-year-old man who was in a stolen Jaguar that sideswiped a squad vehicle. That failure to record is part of an independent investigation. The shooting itself was not captured on by a police body camera.
“Listen, I’ve been involved in four police shootings and countless incidents where we had stolen autos”.
Dozens gathered on the city’s southwest side to protest police brutality and O’Neal’s death, carrying signs with slogans like “Stop racist police terror”.
The cameras were introduced to one police district early previous year as part of a pilot project. On Friday, he promised that if the officers acted improperly, they would “be held accountable for their actions”.
“The shooting of Mr. O’Neal has raised a lot of questions about whether the department policies were indeed followed”, she said. “(We) will not wait to look for ways we can learn from this incident”.
When Johnson attempted to read the statement to reporters outside police headquarters, a small group of protesters interrupted.
But, he said, “It gives me encouragement to see so many young people involved in this struggle”.
CHICAGO (AP) – The Chicago Police Department superintendent said Saturday that the district where last month’s fatal shooting of a black 18-year-old happened had received body cameras about a week prior.
The union representing Chicago police officers urged the public not to rush to judgement.
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“Regardless of that, one police officer did violate the city’s use of force policy, which explicitly bars police from shooting into a auto when the vehicle represents the only danger”, according to the Washington Post. The officer who shot him is now awaiting trial on murder charges. Friday’s release came just eight days after the shooting. Van Dyke was finally charged with first degree murder less than a day before the footage was finally released in November of a year ago.
