Seconds after a Chicago police officer opened fire on him as he ran from a South Side traffic stop, 17-year-old Cedrick Chatman had collapsed in the street when the officer’s partner approached to take him into custody. In a surprise court filing Wednesday, though, the city dropped its opposition, citing the ongoing work of Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s Task Force on Police Accountability, which is expected to issue recommendations in March on the city’s long-standing policy of keeping police shooting videos from the public. That video shows white officer Jason Van Dyke fatally shooting black teenager Laquan McDonald 16 times in 2014.
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His family had asked that the video be made public as it sued the city over the shooting, arguing it would counter the city’s narrative that Chatman posed a danger to police.
Davis, who reviewed the surveillance videos during the course of his investigation, told the Chicago Tribune in November that he never saw Chatman turn toward the officers.
The Department of Justice is investigating the department’s use of lethal force.
At a hearing earlier Thursday, U.S. District Judge Robert Gettleman sharply criticized the city attorneys for suddenly reversing course on the video’s release after spending weeks trying to prevent it. “I think it’s irresponsible”. An attorney for the family stated that the release of the video will further support the claims that there is a systemic problem in Chicago involving the slaying of African American youth by the city’s police force.
According to CNN, another officer then stands on Chatman after he is wounded. “Officer [Kevin] Fry, on the other hand, did not appear to exhaust any method of capturing Chatman other than shooting him and killing him”, Lorenzo Davis, a former IPRA investigator, told ABC 7 Chicago. Still, as recently as late December, city lawyers reiterated in court papers their request to keep the videos private in the Chatman case until a lawsuit from his mother, Linda, was completed.
The city fought teh release of footage of that incident for more than a year, also only making it public only after a court ordered it to do so. After decades of police-community conflict, Cincinnati had embarked on a series of reforms, including new rules that forced prosecutors to make evidence in police shootings available within 48 hours – with a small margin of discretion.
“My reaction is that this is something they could have released not only a month ago, but years ago”, Coffman said.
The officer shot Cedrick Chatman during a foot chase. Activists also want State’s Attorney Anita Alvarez, who blocked release of the McDonald video for a year, to resign.
Chatman’s family attempted to pressure the city of Chicago to release the surveillance video.
Police later discovered the object was an iPhone box.
He shot four times, striking Chatman twice.
While several of the videos are hard to decipher, MSNBC released a frame-by-frame analysis of key moments leading up to the showing.
He runs across the street and squeezes between two parked cars as Fry’s partner, Officer Lou Toth, gives chase. “He was running away, so why kill him?” he said in an interview last month, according to the Times.
The release is part of a lawsuit Chatman’s family filed against the city.
While the officers involved were cleared of wrongdoing, two of Chatman’s friends – Martel Odom, 23, and Akeem Clarke, 22 – were later charged with murder for allegedly “setting into motion” a chain of events that led to Chatman’s death, according to DNAinfo Chicago.
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“I didn’t see any weapon, like a knife or anything like that”.
