U.S. Department of Justice to Investigate Chicago Police Department
The U.S. Justice Department will begin a civil rights investigation of the Chicago Police Department, sources familiar with the matter told several media outlets on Sunday, including the Chicago Tribune, Washington Post and Reuters.
It would resemble the wide-ranging investigation into the Ferguson, Mo. police department, which led to a blistering report about the deep-seated injustices there.
Protests erupted afterwards in the nation’s third-largest city, culminating in the firing on Tuesday of Police Superintendent Garry McCarthy by Mayor Rahm Emanuel.
A formal announcement of the Justice Department probe is expected this week, the Associated Press reports.
The investigation would come as the police force is under intense scrutiny since the recent release of a video showing white police officer Jason Van Dyke shooting black teenager Laquan McDonald 16 times.
The Chicago police video released almost two weeks ago showed that McDonald was veering away from police when Van Dyke shoots him.
Van Dyke was charged with first-degree murder and has been released on bail, but the graphic video’s release sparked outrage and protests across the city, and prompted calls for investigations into the police department and the resignations of Mayor Rahm Emanuel and Cook County State’s Attorney Anita Alvarez.
Emanuel fired the city’s police chief this week over the handling of the case. They primarily use a 1994 law passed in the wake of the Rodney King beating by police in Los Angeles. Shortly after that, the city released a patrol auto video of the shooting.
Van Dyke’s partner, Joseph Walsh, said in the report that McDonald got to within 12 to 15 feet of Van Dyke and “he swung the knife at the officers in an aggressive manner” before he was shot.
This video includes images from Getty Images.
The statement says “new leadership is required as we rededicate ourselves to dramatically improving our system of police accountability and rebuilding trust in that process”.
The video did not show McDonald lunging toward officers as some of them said, although there appears to be a silver object in McDonald’s right hand. If the investigation finds no systemic violations of constitutional or federal statutory rights by the law enforcement agency, the division will state that and close the investigation.
In one of the most notorious cases of wrongdoing, dozens of men, mostly African-American, said they were subjected to torture from a Chicago police squad headed by former commander Jon Burge during the 1970s, ’80s and early ’90s, and many spent years in prison.
Emanuel acknowledged “the checkered history of misconduct in the Chicago Police Department” in an opinion column published over the weekend in the Chicago Sun-Times and Chicago Tribune.