Police spokesman Anthony Guglielmi said that the department and the police review authority were trying to determine why the body camera was not working.
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The videos didn’t actually capture the shooting where the teenager fleeing police after a vehicle chase was shot in the back.
Following widespread outrage over the McDonald video, Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel vowed quicker dissemination of videos of police-involved shootings and set guidelines for the release of all police shooting videos within 60 days of an incident. This time around, the IPRA called the videos “shocking and disturbing”, though said the videos are not the “only evidence”.
The video made public Friday shows officers pursuing the man through a yard and over a fence while shots are heard ringing out.
In a video showing that aftermath of the shooting, the police cursed at O’Neal and handcuffed the dying man face down, reports CNN. He didn’t elaborate about those experiences, but said: “This is a hard job and most people don’t understand that because they’ve never had to do it”.
“You actually see the accident and it appeared to me that you see a Jaguar that Paul was in, the police vehicle goes down the wrong way and slams into the Jaguar, the Jaguar stops”, said O’Neal family attorney Michael Oppenheimer. He praised the relatively early release of the videos but called for a special prosecutor. This time, the city moved swiftly to release the video; it took just one week. “But I really want everybody to know that Paul was loved by my mother, his family, me”.
More than a half-dozen officers are seen racing between houses into backyards in pursuit of a person who fled from the vehicle. The suspect allegedly sideswipes one police auto and then strikes another as officers chase him down a driveway in a neighborhood after the suspect flashed with the vehicle.
“Every time a shooting happens, something’s wrong with the body camera”, Green said. There was also an admission by the officer who believed he fired the fatal shot that he had no idea whether the 18-year-old was armed.
IPRA head Sharon Fairley called the footage “shocking and disturbing” in a statement she released Friday when the video became public.
The officers involved in the shooting have been relieved of their police powers.
O’Neal family, which filed federal civil rights lawsuit against the officers, was expected to see the video before it’s released to the public.
But in the wake of the nation-wide controversy surrounding police shootings, he cautioned that it’s easier to look at events in retrospect.
Many in the nation’s third-largest city are still reeling from the 2014 Laquan McDonald shooting, which left a Chicago officer facing a murder charge after more than a yearlong delay in releasing dashboard camera footage. Johnson promised Friday that that if the officers acted improperly, they would “be held accountable for their actions”, though authorities have not detailed the specific policy, nor identified the officers.
Johnson has said the officers, who he noted Saturday received the same training as the rest of the department, violated a department policy.
“In order to work toward making a better department we must acknowledge the things we can do better and that work starts today”, Johnson said.
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Before Johnson retreated into headquarters, he told several reporters he understood the activists’ concerns in light of the videos.
