Chicago Cop Who Obstructed Release of Laquan McDonald Murder Video Fired

Emanuel yesterday fired the city’s police Superintendent Garry McCarthy.

Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel asked Politico’s Mike Allen to apologize to Emanuel’s wife for inadvertently revealing the mayor’s family-vacation plans during a generally awkward and tense interview.

The officer who killed McDonald fired an astounding 16 rounds at the 17 year old teen, and was recently charged with first degree murder.

The White House spokesman also bristled when asked to compare Obama’s response to the Chicago shooting with his responses to police violence in Ferguson, Missouri, and Baltimore. “This killing indicates the detachment of city leaders from the plight of black, teenage youth on the South Side of Chicago and a willingness by the city to criminalize blackness as opposed to reforming structural inequality”.

Although crime has decreased under McCarthy in the nation’s third largest city, the mayor said it was time for him to step down.

Former Chicago alderman Dick Simpson, now a political science professor at the University of IL at Chicago, said that he did not think Emanuel would resign unless he lost so much support that he was unable to accomplish anything.

Several editorials, including one from The New York Times editorial board, have asserted that Emanuel blocked release of the video because the footage would hurt his chances at re-election.

“Any case of excessive force or abuse of authority undermines the entire force and the trust we must build with every community in the city”, the mayor said. Right before the video’s release, prosecutors announced they would charge Van Dyke with murder.

The Chicago video shows McDonald walking down the middle of a four-lane street. Critics are demanding to know why the city did not release the video early in the year, in what some are calling a cover-up that helped Emanuel win his re-election battle.

A group of retired black Chicago police officers has joined the call for a federal civil rights investigation of the Chicago Police Department’s practices, saying the Laquan McDonald case illustrates a problem with racism on the police force.

Van Dyke left jail on Monday on bail.

The Justice Department has begun a probe of the shooting.

But Clinton is siding with Illinois Attorney General Lisa Madigan, another influential Democrat, who has called for the Justice Department to look into the police use of deadly force. The mayor praised McCarthy’s leadership but said it’s an “undeniable fact” that the public’s trust in the police had eroded.

“It is unacceptable that it took over a year to file these charges against Officer Van Dyke”, Crump wrote in a statement reported by Mashable.

The shooting took place back in October 2014, and was captured on a police dash cam.

The police initially painted a picture of McDonald lunging at police, but the video, forced to be released by a judge, tells a far different story.