Emanuel is also setting up a task force to study police violence. To add fuel to the cover up conspiracy, 86 minutes of footage was deleted from a Burger King’s security camera, including footage of the shooting.
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The footage, which doesn’t have audio, shows an officer sitting in front of a computer and another officer walking around.
Why, for example, did the city sit on the dash-cam video for more than a year before a judge ordered its release on open-records grounds? But compare that to the Cincinnati case last summer in which black driver Samuel DuBose was fatally shot on camera by University of Cincinnati police officer Ray Tensing during a routine traffic stop.
Such are the suspicions that haunt the city’s stalling for more than a year the release of a dashcam video that shows white police officer Jason Van Dyke firing 16 shots into the body of black 17-year-old Laquan McDonald.
Bishop Larry Trotter, who endorsed Emanuel for re-election this year, said the African American community feels insulted by the city’s handling of the McDonald case. It took 400 days for the video to be released.
Obama foes have claimed that this could be another form of selective enforcement or non-enforcement of the law which was reflected, for example, by heightened IRS scrutiny of Tea Party groups (where the Justice Department investigation ultimately found no criminal activity) or the federal prosecution of anti-Obama documentarian Dinesh D’Souza for a relatively minor campaign finance violation.
“I am 100-percent certain that Ronald had nothing in his hands when he was running”, the Johnson family’s attorney, Michael Oppenheimer, said during a press conference earlier this week. Police initially said the officer involved in the shooting, who has since been charged with first-degree murder, was defending himself and that McDonald lunged at him with a knife.
On Tuesday, Mayor Rahm Emanuel fired Chicago’s police superintendent, Gary McCarthy.
He says once that and other investigations play out, “we can discuss further from those results”.
Oppenheimer, who once worked as a prosecutor in the Cook County attorney’s office – which Alvarez now leads – also argued her inquiry clearly isn’t serious because none of the key witnesses have even been interviewed. He indicated her future should be a local decision. “That gun was not in his hand unless the police glued it to his hand”. His mother, Dorothy Holmes, said that wasn’t the case and her son was running away from police.
Among other issues, Chicago and other cities will have to determine, like the rest of us, how to adjust to the new video age, an age that exposes so much to public view that used to be swept under various rugs.
Oppenheimer has seen the video in his role as the family’s attorney in a wrongful death lawsuit against Hernandez and the city, but was prohibited by court order from showing it to the public. The videos contained little discernible sound, an issue that city officials are looking into but have blamed on a possible technical problem. I think that one of the reasons I asked the former head of the Civil Rights Division, Deval Patrick, to be an outside adviser and senior adviser to this working commission is because it’s exactly the question he is familiar with and he has a different set of eye – I think is essential. But then Hillary Clinton called for one and now the mayor is for it.
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On Wednesday Emanuel called a federal civil rights investigation “misguided”. On Wednesday, Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton called for a Justice Department investigation into Chicago police tactics.
