The trial for Chicago police commander accused of shoving a gun into a suspect’s throat has ended and Cook County Judge Diane Cannon will return a verdict on Monday. But prosecutors acknowledge that Williams failed to identify the alleged assailant in a photo lineup.
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The city has spent more than $500 million over the last decade on payouts and legal fees to mostly African-American men who have alleged abuse by Chicago police officers.
Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel has apologized for the 2014 killing of a black teenager who was shot 16 times by a white police officer.
But she won’t be back there for another two weeks, she said.
Coleman’s family says in a statement that Emanuel’s speech was “disingenuous” and the apology should have mentioned Philip Coleman.
According to Dart’s office one officer still went to McDonald’s side and “offered him words of comfort” until an ambulance arrived.
“If they would’ve indicted the officer who killed my son, there would’ve have been no Laquan McDonald”, Emmett Farmer said.
I know the history of police-community relations in Chicago.
Chicago medical students staged a “die-in” calling for the resignation of Mayor Rahm Emanuel in front of City Hall.
Another problem: Crossing the police, for any mayor at any time, is unsafe. The city resisted releasing dashcam video showing the shooting until late last month, then did so the same day Van Dyke was charged with murder.
Earlier in the week, several black organizers demonstrated in the Washington Park neighborhood to lambaste Alavrez for opting not to prosecute Officer George Hernandez in the fatal shooting of Ronald Johnson III in October 2014. They want to at least be able to say the officer is being charged so as to stymie outrage after people saw the video.
Several protesters staged a brief sit-in as a form of civil disobedience on Michigan Avenue before they continued to walk south on the street, blocking traffic in one of the city’s main roads.
“Specifically, we will examine a number of issues related to the Chicago Police Department’s use of force, including its use of deadly force, racial, ethnic and other disparities in its use of force”, US Attorney General Loretta Lynch told the press.
The Chicago Alliance Against Racist and Political Repression filed the complaint on the families’ behalf Thursday.
Given that 51% of respondents in a poll this week want Emanuel to resign, that’s not much of a threshold.
The alliance turned over a list of dozens of cases, including shootings of teenagers by officers and what the group describes as coerced confessions and torture.
Since the release of the McDonald video there have been regular protests against police brutality.
The search for a new Superintendent of Police in Chicago has begun, officials announced Thursday.
Protester Aaron Clay, 34, said that while Emanuel’s speech may have been emotional, ‘I don’t think it was an apology to the community’.
John Escalante, a former chief of detectives, is interim police superintendent.
Thanks in part to a series of missteps by the mayor after the shooting, exacerbated by a longer-term failure to address more systemic problems with Chicago’s police department, Emanuel appears to have lost much of the city’s trust. If the current mayor is recalled, a separate election will be held for prospective candidates.
To bolster that claim, Oppenheimer played a portion of Hernandez’s video-recorded deposition taken a month ago as part of the lawsuit in which the officer says he had never been contacted by Alvarez’s office.
Mayor Rahm Emanuel today delivered a special address on police accountability to the City Council that laid out a roadmap to restore the public’s trust in the police department.
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But around the same time, Emanuel called a Justice Department investigation of the Chicago Police Department “misguided”, even though Illinois’ state attorney, one of its US senators and its governor – as well as Democratic presidential front-runner Hillary Clinton- all said it was merited.
