It’s hard to put a positive spin on the release of a video showing a white Chicago police officer needlessly snuffing out the life of a black teen, but Mayor Emanuel did his best Tuesday afternoon. ”This episode can be a moment of understanding and learning,” the mayor said at a press conference at police headquarters.
That the mayor would focus on police becoming “fetal” was especially remarkable given that he was well aware, when he made those comments, of the dashboard-camera video showing the final moments of Laquan McDonald’s brief life—a life ended by officer Jason Van Dyke on an evening in October 2014. McDonald, 17, was carrying a small knife, but in the video he appears to be walking away from police. Van Dyke shot him again and again and again, 16 times in all, the final bullets fired when McDonald lay limp on Pulaski Road—in nearly a fetal position.
IPRA’s predecessor, the Office of Professional Standards, was a unit of the police department. In 2007, the Tribune reported that less than 1 percent of the more than 200 police shootings in the previous decade reviewed by OPS had been ruled unjustified. This record led some Chicagoans to believe “that officers can shoot people with impunity,” the Trib said.
The mayor also ought to learn what transparency really means when it comes to police shootings, and how far IPRA falls short of it. When IPRA completes an investigation of a shooting by an officer, it surreptitiously publishes its summary and finding on its website. To locate a particular summary, one must know the year the case originated, navigate through three headings to a list of log numbers, and hunt through the summaries associated with the log numbers for a case that seems, from the date and address, to be the right one. Officers are identified only as “Officer A”, “Officer B”, “Officer C”, etc. A less transparent system would be hard to devise. It’s yet another way in which police officers, and IPRA itself, are shielded from scrutiny.
