Last Wednesday, Mayor Rahm Emanuel proclaimed the arrival of a fresh new era of sincerity and openness concerning policing in Chicago. “I know that personally, I have a lot of work to do to win back the public’s trust, and that words are not enough,” the mayor told the City Council.
The mayor fought for months to suppress the video showing the slaying of the 17-year-old McDonald. And now he’s continuing to fight to suppress videos of the fatal police shooting of 17-year-old Cedrick Chatman almost three years ago.
Fry meantime had run diagonally into 75th Street, his semiautomatic pistol drawn. Chatman, five-foot-seven and 133 pounds, was unarmed, but he had a dark gray iPhone box in his right hand. He “slowed down at the corner and began to turn to his right,” Fry would later tell an investigator for the Independent Police Review Authority. “I was able to see a dark object in his hand which I believed to be a handgun. . . . In fear of Officer Toth’s life and my own life, I fired four shots.” One of the shots struck Chatman in the right side. He was pronounced dead within the hour.
The Laquan McDonald video was released because of a November 19 ruling against the city by Cook County Circuit Court judge Franklin Valderrama in a FOIA case. Freelance reporter Brandon Smith had sought the video from CPD in a FOIA request filed in late May. Like the FOIA requests for the McDonald video from numerous other journalists, Smith’s was ultimately denied. In early August, he appealed in court.
In Linda Chatman’s lawsuit, the city’s lawyers won a protective order last year barring release of the videos before the case is tried. Last Wednesday, U.S. District judge Robert Gettleman denied the motion of Chatman’s lawyers to lift that protective order, but indicated he might grant the motion at the next court hearing, on January 14. The protective order governs only matters in the court case; it doesn’t preclude CPD or IPRA from releasing records in response to FOIA requests.
