Before the poll was conducted last week, Emanuel fired his police superintendent, Garry McCarthy, and announced that he was creating a blue ribbon task force to bolster police accountability.
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But such assurances are likely to be met with skepticism in a city that’s been plagued for years by a string of incidents of apparent police abuse followed by promises of reform.
Hours before the Coleman video was made public, prosecutors released footage of a Chicago officer fatally shooting Ronald Johnson, who was 25 and black, in the back in 2014. McDonald, 17, was gunned down by officers, and in his case, Officer Jason Van Dyke was charged with first-degree murder.
On the heels of the Laquan McDonald verdict which was reached at the end of November, another verdict was reached on Monday in a fatal Chicago shooting by a police officer.
The Chicago Police Department, facing nearly daily protests and a newly announced Justice Department investigation, released footage Monday night showing a 38-year-old black man being shocked by a Taser and dragged down a hallway by officers in 2012.
Criminal investigations typically have a narrow focus, while federal civil rights investigations scrutinize the entire structure and operation of an agency and its “patterns and practices”. Justice Department officials say they use so-called patterns-and-practices probes to identify systemic failings in troubled police departments and to improve trust between police and the communities they serve. Mayor Rahm Emmanuel said of this investigation, quote “we welcome it; we need it”. That was in Pittsburgh, the first city the federal government targeted for intervention in 1997. Oppenheimer also described the state attorney’s press conference, which used blown-up visuals-that Alvarez herself described as “grainy, dark (and) blurry”-to prove their allegations, as a “27-minute infomercial”. We have another part of the Civil Rights Division working with our U.S. Attorney’s office that does that. Shortly afterwards, the city released a patrol auto video of the shooting, which showed Van Dyke had fired all the shots. Johnson is not on screen when he was struck by two bullets.
Responding to a reporter’s question, Alvarez did not state explicitly that the video showed that Johnson was armed. Prosecutors say a loaded weapon was found in his hand after he was killed.
Alvarez said Hernandez would have been able to see a man struggle with a plainclothes officer before breaking away and fleeing on foot and could hear officers shouting for the man – Johnson – to stop and drop his weapon.
Oppenheimer accused Chicago police of covering up Johnson’s death by planting a 9-mm pistol on his body and later claiming Johnson had pointed it at them prior to the shooting.
Organizers said late Monday that roughly 50 to 100 protesters were marching and rallying on the city’s South Side.
More than 51% of likely voters said Emanuel should resign, while 29% said he should not step down, according to the poll commissioned by The Insider, a newsletter published by Illinois Observer.
The video of McDonald’s shooting is certainly upsetting, but the outrage it has sparked also reflects the knowledge that without that video, McDonald’s murder would have been just one more police crime papered over by an “accountability” system that embodies the code of silence.
Duckworth issued a carefully worded statement on Facebook last month after the video was released, but did not take a position on how the mayor’s office handled the issue.
At the time of the incident in October 2014, Mayor Rahm Emanuel was looking ahead to a hotly-contested re-election in February 2015, which he would later win in a run-off in April. The video, taken from the dash cam of a squad vehicle, doesn’t show the moment Johnson was shot by Hernandez.
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Even though IPRA investigates all police shootings and complaints of excessive force, Fairley’s call for the city inspector general to investigate the police officers in the McDonald shooting is not unprecedented. A police review board found the officers’ actions justified, but Escalante said Monday that the matter is under investigation and Emanuel said the case is not closed.
