Chicago cop won’t be charged for shooting man to death

Last month, the same state attorney charged another Chicago officer, Jason Van Dyke, with first-degree murder for killing 17-year-old Laquan McDonald by shooting him 16 times.

For almost an hour, McCarthy used a PowerPoint presentation to explain in detail where police cars were and where Johnson ran from officers. Alvarez said that Johnson had been asked repeatedly by multiple officers to drop his weapon, and that a 9mm semiautomatic pistol was found with Johnson after he was shot.

“I do not see how the manner in which Mr. Coleman was physically treated could possibly be acceptable”, Emanuel said in a statement released Monday night, along with the video. She appeared with Emanuel at City Hall and said she has no agenda beyond the pursuit of integrity and transparency. Immediately after, some of the officers restrain him. Coleman was held in a Chicago police lockup on the city’s Far South Side, where he is shown on surveillance video resting in a small cell with spartan furnishings. The Cook County State’s Attorney said no charges will be filed against the officer who shot Johnson.

McCarthy showed a photo of a gun that she said was taken from the scene and had grass lodged in it. That gun, she said, was tied to a shooting that occurred in Chicago in 2013.

Attorney Michael Oppenheimer, left, next to Dorothy Holmes, right, mother of Ronald Johnson, speaks …

They continue to insist that Johnson was not armed. Could the investigation go that high if that’s where the facts were to lead you, as you said? “There is no gun visible in Ronald Johnson’s hand, because there was none”.

Until now, action against any officers in a case is delayed until all criminal charges are dealt with.

The U.S. Justice Department is investigating whether Chicago police have made a habit of violating the law or the U.S. Constitution in their policing, Attorney General Loretta Lynch announced yesterday.

The push to make the Johnson shooting video public had been months in the making.

The law enforcement official said the morning news conference would be attended by Lynch, the U.S. Attorney in Chicago, Zachary Fardon, and Vanita Gupta, the head of Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division.

Every day, police officers with sustained Rule 14 violations on their record – some who helped cover for co-workers by getting the story straight – are still out patrolling Chicago streets. She reminded the crowd, “Ronnieman’s life matters”. As proceedings dragged on, Mayor Rahm Emanuel doggedly resisted all calls to release dash-camera video of the shooting.

Despite the evidence in this probe, we will try to work with the local authorities, residents and officials to make sure the people of Chicago have the world class police department they deserve, said Lynch during a press conference in Washington. Our expert is telling us there are aggravated circumstances and the police did all of them. The video was kept private, away from the public, for a year.

Van Dyke is white, and McDonald was black. Five days later, the proposed settlement was presented to the Chicago City Council Finance Committee.

Dean Angelo, president of the Chicago Fraternal Order of Police Lodge 7, the union that represents those officers, did not return calls seeking comment about the conflicting statements. Protesters chanted, “16 shots and a coverup!” He also announced on Sunday that he had replaced the head of the city’s Independent Police Review Authority, which reviews police misconduct allegations. “I think this Department of Justice Investigation is going to take a look back at that and provide some serious oversight, which has been lacking for decades in Chicago”.

Among 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. In March, the department released a scathing report of the Ferguson police force that found pervasive civil rights abuses.