“You never want a serious crisis to go to waste,” Rahm Emanuel famously said in November 2008. Then chief of staff to president-elect Barack Obama, Emanuel was referring to the nation’s financial crisis. “It’s an opportunity to do things that you think you could not do before,” he told the Wall Street Journal. “Things that we had postponed for too long . . . are now immediate and must be dealt with.”
Scrutinizing IPRA is essential. But the mayor should have begun that effort after he assumed office four and a half years ago, when it would have shown genuine concern, instead of one week after the release of the Laquan video, when it amounts to damage control.
The vast majority of witnesses to police shootings are police officers. They inevitably back each other up, but there often are contradictions in their stories—contradictions that IPRA investigators seem unwilling to explore.
And consider another IPRA case, one that Alex Kotlowitz wrote about yesterday on the New Yorker’s website. On a May night in 2011, 19-year-old Calvin Cross was shot dead by police in West Pullman. Three officers later said that when they came upon Cross, they thought he might have drugs or a gun because he was fidgeting with something in his waistband. From their squad car, they ordered him to show his hands, but he ran instead. The officers claimed that when they chased Cross, he fired back at them, so they returned fire—45 rounds in all, five of which hit Cross.
In Madigan’s letter to Attorney General Lynch, she referred to a few specific police shooting cases. One of them occurred in December 2013, when officer Marco Proano fired a dozen shots into a car filled with unarmed African-American teens on the far south side. Two of the teens were wounded. The car had been curbed for speeding, and Proano started shooting when it began backing up, although he wasn’t in its path.
