Mayor: Chicago police reforms should make force last option

“Willful misconduct and abuse can not and will not be tolerated”.

The statement said the police department will also begin to require every officer who “responds to calls for service” to be equipped with a Taser and trained to use it by June 1, 2016.

Most U.S. police receive little or no training on how to de-escalate crisis situations involving the mentally ill or people under the effect of drugs or alcohol, despite the growing frequency of such encounters and fatal results in a number of recent cases.

Another police shooting over the weekend left two dead.

Outrage alone isn’t going to reform police or lower police abuse in Chicago or anywhere else-changes to the laws and contracts that offer the privileges that thwart police transparency and accountability will.

Jason Van Dyke is charged with six counts of first-degree murder and one count of official misconduct as a result of the shooting, an event that has led to massive public outcry in Chicago since the release of a dash cam video of the shooting, with many calling for Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel to step down. The officer who fired killed LeGrier and accidentally shot Jones.

Ted Pearson, one of the leaders of the Chicago Alliance Against Racist and Political Repression, noted that Emanuel made leadership changes after the release of the McDonald video and gave a speech before the City Council in which he apologized, appearing at times to be near tears.

A vigil by former students is planned for LeGrier on Tuesday evening at Gwendolyn Brooks College Preparatory Academy, a selective enrollment high school LeGrier had attended, said Daniel Bauer, assistant principal.

afagen/flickrSince November, Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel has faced protests over police abuse sparked by the release of video of the 2014 police shooting of 17-year-old Laquan McDonald by Officer Jason Van Dyke.

He said the shootings last weekend of Quintonio LeGrier, 19, and his 55-year-old neighbor Bettie Jones show Chicago police officers continue to “have some sense of comfortability within yourself to believe you can do this without any kind of recourse”.

A white Chicago police officer who shot a black teenager 16 times has pleaded not guilty to murder charges.

The footage set off weeks of protests and led to the forced resignation of Chicago’s police superintendent and a federal investigation of department practices.

Protests have taken place around the country and the issue has fueled a civil rights movement under the name Black Lives Matter.

The city has already announced it will add more body cameras to police equipment and that officers involved in fatal shootings will be put on a mandatory 30-day period of desk duty, compared with the current three-day policy.

When a New York Times editorial described the Emanuel administration’s actions as a blatant “cover up”, writing that the city seemed to have done everything in its power to delay release of the video, the mayor’s chief of communications wrote an email expressing shock.

Jones’ daughter, Latisha Jones, has said the officer who shot her mother should be charged with murder.