Chicago mayor: McCarthy out as police superintendent

Thousands of protesters barred shoppers from entering stores on Chicago’s upscale Magnificent Mile during the Black Friday extravaganza and smaller demonstrations have disrupted traffic in recent days. He is the first Chicago police officer in decades to be charged with first-degree murder.

Calls for the resignation of the police superintendent Garry McCarthy and the prosecutor in the case, State’s Attorney Anita Alvarez are growing louder.

Officer Jason Van Dyke had been locked up since November 24, when prosecutors charged him with first-degree murder in the shooting death of 17-year-old Laquan McDonald.

The video footage – among a string of police shootings of black boys or men in the United States – triggered protests in Chicago and fueled a national debate about racism and the use of deadly force by officers. Van Dyke fired 13 of the shots while McDonald was on the ground, the video shows.

“Trust in the Chicago Police Department is broken”. The video was only released after a journalist filed a Freedom of Information Act request, and a judge ordered the city to make it public. It gets worse, though.

Then there’s the question of what happened to video from a security camera at a nearby Burger King.

Even after the city paid a $5 million settlement to McDonald’s family – although a lawsuit had not even been filed – details were scarce. It might have settled earlier, according to a critical op-ed in the New York Times, except there were electoral considerations at play.

Cook County Commissioner Jesus “Chuy” Garcia said on Monday that he and a group of Latino leaders would call on Alvarez to step down. They could no longer keep the official story going.

Citing an anonymous source close to the investigation, the Chicago Sun-Times reports that the forensic analysis “found no evidence of tampering” with video from the fateful night previous year. Hundreds of protesters, among them the Rev. Jesse Jackson, demonstrated on Saturday as well, chanting “No justice, no profit”.

Protestors took the streets by 11 a.m. and continued until 10 p.m. Despite the few fights and police arrests, the protest remained under control and somewhat peaceful.

McDonald’s brutal death was captured on dashcam, and it was later determined that he had been shot by Van Dyke 16 times. He appeared in court Monday morning. “He is prepared to defend himself”, said Dan Herbert, Van Dyke’s attorney. Van Dyke was released from jail Monday after paying the required $150,000 of his $1.5 million bail.

In April, Mayor Rahm Emanuel echoed the statements of Alvarez saying that the police and FBI were rightfully withholding the dash-cam video from the public while they conducted their rigorous, intensive, and meticulous investigation. “What I’ve asked the task force to do: see if the oversight and the accountability of discipline systems are as vigorous as they need to be and if there are any changes”, Emanuel said.