“Hillary Clinton is deeply troubled by the shooting of Laquan McDonald and the outstanding questions related to both the shooting and the video”, said Brian Fallon in a statement.
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When the video was released, Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel and Police Superintendent Garry McCarthy spoke together at a press conference urging the city to remain nonviolent.
The city argued that releasing the video would taint the investigation of the case, but even the attorney general of IL urged the city to make it available. He said the president had not called McDonald’s family but did not rule out such a call.
The mayor, who brought McCarthy in after he first won election, said he was left with “the undeniable fact that the public trust in the leadership in the department has been shaken and eroded”.
Unlike McCarthy, Escalante has risen through the police department ranks.
This prosecutor dragged her feet for over a year on indicting the policeman shown in that video firing 16-shots into Laquan McDonald. The announcement comes after protesters demanded that McCarthy step down over the way the police department handled the death of McDonald.
Van Dyke had at least 20 complaints of misconduct against him during his years on the force, but was never disciplined, according to the Invisible Institute transparency group.
Emanuel also said he was creating a new police accountability task force.
“Then it becomes extremely hard”, Yeomans said. “It was the police who maintained a code of silence despite at least seven other officers who witnessed the shooting at close range”.
The Chicago mayor noted that, over the past four and a half years that McCarthy served as superintendent his work “has led to the lowest overall crime rate on record”.
McCarthy rose through the ranks of New York City’s police department and was police director in Newark, New Jersey, when he was hired in Chicago. And though it has been more than 13 months since McDonald’s death, and the city has since reached a $5 million settlement with the family, Emanuel said he had not watched the footage personally until it was eventually made public last week.
The city said the dashboard camera video could not be released while the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the U.S. Attorney investigated the shooting.
Jason Van Dyke, the officer who shot McDonald, was charged with first-degree murder hours before the video was released.
Former Chicago alderman Dick Simpson, now a political science professor at the University of IL at Chicago, said that he did not think Emanuel would resign unless he lost so much support that he was unable to accomplish anything. McDonald was armed with a knife, and investigators say he had taken PCP.
Now she is asking for a Federal civil rights investigation into the force.
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“What we did see from Mayor Emanuel in the news conference he held yesterday was a personal commitment to follow through on reforms he believes are needed within the Chicago Police Department”, the spokesman said.
