Chicago police have faced public outrage and intensified scrutiny in recent weeks after the release of the October 2014 video of Officer Jason Van Dyke fatally shooting teenager Laquan McDonald on a Chicago street.
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Authorities will look at the department’s use of force, including deadly force, among other issues, Attorney General Loretta Lynch said. What is clear is that a man who McCarthy said was Johnson is seen running around a corner. Van Dyke is charged with first-degree murder, for which he has pleaded not guilty.
Chicago police released hundreds of pages in the McDonald case on Friday that show police officers reported a very different version of the encounter than the video shows, portraying McDonald as being more menacing than he appears in dashcam footage.
The two met last month when Chicago police released the video of the police shooting of black 17-year-old Laquan McDonald. Last week, Illinois Attorney General Lisa Madigan and others called on the US Department of Justice’s Civil Rights division to investigate. In Ferguson, a St. Louis suburb which drew national attention following the fatal shooting of an unarmed black teen by a white police officer, federal authorities found racially biased abuses in both the police department and municipal court.
The previous head of the authority resigned Sunday.
On Monday, Emanuel talked up Fairley’s qualifications and said she would help “to reinvigorate an essential oversight body that we as a city rely on as it relates to oversight and accountability in the police department”.
While Mr. Emanuel has promised cooperation, there is likely to be a good deal of institutional resistance to the federal probe. The federal government has the option of suing a police department that is unwilling to make changes. She said the witness Oppenheimer claimed was coerced gave a videotaped statement to the office and a taped audio statement under oath to the Independent Police Review Authority. To show how such events can quickly turn tragic for police, Alvarez also played a video of an unrelated shooting in which a fleeing suspect had shot and wounded an officer giving chase.
The statement says Sharon Fairly, general counsel and first deputy of the city’s Office of the Inspector General, will take over Ando’s role.
“None of the measures we have taken have ever measured up to the seriousness, the scope, the scale of the challenge in front of us as a city”, Emanuel said.
Since IPRA was formed in September 2007, there have been 409 shootings by police, or about one a week. Alvarez said that Johnson had been asked repeatedly by multiple officers to drop his weapon, and that a 9mm semiautomatic pistol was found with Johnson after he was shot.
Mayor Rahm Emanuel said Thursday the city will release video showing the death of Ronald Johnson, 25, more than a year ago, according to CNN affiliate WLS-TV. Cook County States Attorney Anita Alvarez announced yesterday that Officer George Hernandez acted reasonably under the law.
The storm over the Chicago police’s use of force shows no sign of abating. But they quickly closed ranks, and their official accounts of the shooting do not match the video, which was withheld from the public until a judge ordered it released, 13 months after McDonald died.
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Authorization for the Justice Department to conduct such investigations came under a 1994 civil-rights law passed after a black motorist, Rodney King, was videotaped being beaten by police in Los Angeles. Is there an entrenched culture or something systemic in the department that leads to civil-rights violations? “But as you know, while her work in the state’s attorney(‘s office) ends, IPRA’s work as it relates to disciplinary action and in their investigatory work begins today, which is why it’s also essential that you have new leadership at that office”.
