Chicago is the latest city to be thrust into the national spotlight for a police shooting of a young African-American male, and the U.S. Department of Justice should investigate whether there was a cover-up and a deeper longstanding pattern of police brutality.
Laquan McDonald, 17, was shot 16 times by Officer Jason Van Dyke in October 2014. But it took 400 days for the city to release the shooting video only after a court order. A $5 million settlement was paid out to the family of McDonald.
{mosads}On Tuesday, Mayor Rahm Emanuel, President Obama’s former chief of staff, asked Chicago police Superintendent Garry McCarthy to resign and the top cop stepped down.
But he’s just the fall guy. We all know who the modern-day “boss” is here in Chicago.
There are calls for Emanuel to resign, and for the Cook County State’s Attorney, Anita Alvarez, also to resign.
Illinois Attorney General Lisa Madigan called Tuesday for a U.S. Department of Justice investigation into whether there is excessive use of force and a pattern of discriminatory policing in Chicago.
But the problems go much deeper than just this latest shooting.
In a letter to U.S. Attorney General Loretta Lynch, Madigan wrote that only one of 400 police shootings was found to be unjustified in a review by the Independent Police Review Authority. There were more than 28,500 citizen complaints against police from 2011 to 2015 but in 97 percent of the cases no officers were punished, according to the Citizens Police Data Project. Over the past five years, whites were seven times more likely to have complaints sustained by the city than African-Americans. But African-Americans filed three times more complaints, Madigan wrote.
Her letter outlined five other cases of alleged police misconduct including the police shooting of Ronald Johnson in October 2014. The mother of Johnson is suing the city to have the dashcam video released.
The Guardian also has extensively reported that police have “disappeared” thousands of people, mostly African Americans, by holding them without charges or access to attorneys at an “off the books interrogation warehouse.”
According to an analysis by the Better Government Association, Chicago police fatally shot 70 people between 2010 and 2014. This is more than any other police department in a major U.S. city.
And the BGA also found that over the last decade the city has paid $500 million in police-related settlements, judgments, legal fees and other costs. This is almost as much as the property tax hike recently approved by the City Council this fall.
One of the most notorious cases of Chicago police brutality was under police Commander Jon Burge convicted in 2010 of perjury and obstruction of justice. From 1972 to 1991, he used electric shock, suffocation with plastic bags and typewriter covers, mock executions and brutal attacks on the genitals to obtain confessions from more than 100 African American men, according to human rights lawyer Flint Taylor.
Voters also have to take responsibility for re-electing Emanuel in April when the level of gang violence and history of police brutality was well known in Chicago.
A majority of black voters, 57 percent, and white voters, 65 percent, supported Emanuel. A majority of Latino voters, 61 percent, supported his opponent Cook County Commissioner Jesus “Chuy” Garcia.
However, Chicagoans of all races and ethnicities have expressed their outrage and have peacefully protested the McDonald shooting and delayed video release.
All this comes as the new Spike Lee movie “Chi-Raq” highlighting the gang violence in Chicago will be in theaters this Friday. The mayor and some city alderman were fearful Lee’s film would give the city a bad rap for all the gun violence.
It’s way too late for that.
In her letter, Madigan wrote that “trust in the Chicago police department is broken, especially in communities of color.”
The only way to repair that trust for all Chicagoans is for our city, county and police officials to be held accountable.
Puente is an associate professor of journalism at Columbia College Chicago and a senior facilitator with The OpEd Project. She also writes the Chicanísima blog.