Police fatally shoot Bettie Jones and Quintonio LeGrier in in Chicago
She urged the city’s main police oversight agency, the Independent Police Review Authority, to perform an investigation of its own.
A video of the officer shooting McDonald which was not made public until more than a year later, on November 24 led to protests and repeated calls for Emanuel to resign.
The Associated Press reports that the emails show “the Chicago mayor’s office, police and the body that investigates police shootings closely coordinated their actions” following McDonald’s death.
Lawyers from McDonald’s family reached out to the city about a settlement in early 2015, more than a month before Emanuel’s re-election.
In Chicago, protesters at City Hall on Thursday punched a papier mache effigy of the mayor’s face and chanted “Hey, hey!”
Emanuel cut short a family vacation in Cuba this week to return to the city to deal with public anger after police shot and killed a 55-year-old mother, Bettie Jones, and a 19-year-old college student, Quintonio LeGrier. A statement from the organizers say the latest deaths demonstrate Emanuel’s response to police shootings “continues to be fundamentally inadequate”. The dashcam video reveals that Chicago police officer Jason Van Dyke fired 16 bullets into McDonald, some of which were shot after the teen had collapsed to the ground. “This case will undoubtedly bring a microscope of national attention to the shooting itself as well as the city’s pattern, practice and procedures in rubber-stamping fatal police shootings of African Americans as ‘justified'”.
The crime statistics released on New Year’s Day come during a challenging time for the city.
In its efforts to delay release of the video, which might have been seen as a threat to Emanuel’s re-election campaign in February 2015, the city reportedly also asked McDonald’s family attorney to agree not to release the video until Van Dyke was charged.
The video showed McDonald veering away from officers before he was repeatedly shot, including while he was facedown on the pavement. It also led to an ongoing civil-rights investigation of the entire Chicago Police Department by the U.S. Department of Justice. They put their lives on the line so the rest of us can be safe. Today, we’re taking additional steps to create more time and distance in these situations and other encounters to make environments safe, and safer, for all. “Our job is to reduce the chances of mistakes”.