5 More Must-Reads About The Laquan McDonald Shooting And Fallout
By Kate Shepherd in News on Dec 4, 2015 10:48PM
Calls for Rahm to resign are trending on Twitter and in the streets (Photo by Braden Nesin/Chicagoist)
In the week and a half since the release of the shocking and disturbing Laquan McDonald video to the public, protestors disrupted Black Friday, Chicago Police chief Garry McCarthy was fired and calls for the resignations of Mayor Rahm Emanuel and Cook County State's Attorney Anita Alvarez have gotten louder.
Of course, thousands of people from the public and the media have expressed their opinions online, as well as in the streets, and we've rounded up some of the most interesting think pieces from the week for you.
The New Republic: Mayor Rahm Emanuel's next scandal will probably be Chicago's appalling public housing situation. More than 125,000 Chicagoans are currently homeless but about 16% of Chicago Housing Authority units are uninhabited:
Public housing in Chicago suffers from stereotypes born of high-profile 90s-era social ills in projects like Cabrini-Green and the Robert Taylor homes, and many Chicagoans would rather turn their gaze away from the institution and those who rely on it. They shouldn’t. As the city looks elsewhere, the Chicago Housing Authority has been quietly and steadily perpetrating some of the most disturbing institutional mismanagement in a city where jaw-dropping corruption is a spectator sport.
The Chicago Reader:: Emanuel quickly backtracked on his statement that a federal investigation of the Chicago Police Department would be "in my view would be misguided." He "clarified" his comments in a statement the next day, saying he welcomes a federal investigation:
Emanuel didn't want to admit that he was bowing to political pressure with his revised stance on a federal probe of CPD; that would betray weakness. In a similar vein, the mayor could claim he stayed consistent on police superintendent Garry McCarthy. Last week, he fully supported McCarthy; this week, he clarified that he fully supported McCarthy's resignation.
The Chicago Reporter: Getting rid of McCarthy was the right decision, but what about the executive director of the Independent Police Review Authority Scott Ando? IPRA didn't take any action on numerous complaints against police Officer Jason Van Dyke, who's accused of killing McDonald:
IPRA was never as independent as it was supposed to be; for one thing, it inherited the staff of the police department's Office of Professional Standards, which it was supposed to replace. But under Ando, who was appointed by Emanuel, IPRA has "a strong bias to protect police accused of wrongdoing," said Craig Futterman, a University of Chicago law professor who has studied CPD's disciplinary record.
The Chicago Reporter: The task force on police reform announced by Emanuel this week is just a throwback to previous attempts to quell CPD corruption like the creation of the IPRA in 2007. The reform initiatives never review patterns of misconduct which is a huge mistake:
Ilana Rosenzweig, who led IPRA from its inception in 2007 until 2013, said her investigators conducted searches of an officer's full record of complaints when they started an investigation, but they were limited in what they could get. IPRA has access to complaint history and investigative records but no other internal CPD records, such as discipline histories or performance evaluations. In addition, the union contract limits what actions IPRA can take based on prior complaint history."IPRA doesn't have access to the entire personnel file of an officer," said Rosenzweig. "So its ability to perform a holistic review of an officer's past performance is limited."
The Chicago Reader: Does anyone really believe that Emanuel didn't watch the McDonald video before it was released to the public? It's possible he didn't, but it's not very likely:
My point is that sometimes Mayor Emanuel-like all of us-finds himself saying something that is just not true. And you know how it goes with that.Once you tell a lie, you're stuck with it in order to avoid explaining why you told the lie in the first place. And then you have to say it over and over until it becomes like an albatross hanging around your neck.