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U.S. Attorney General Loretta Lynch launches civil rights investigation of Chicago police
“We welcome the engagement of the Department of Justice as we work to restore trust in our police department and improve our system of police accountability,” Collins said.
The U.S. Justice Department in the last 6 years has opened more than 20 investigations of police departments. In March, the department released a scathing report of the Ferguson police force that found pervasive civil rights abuses. It opened an investigation of Baltimore police in May in response to the death of a black man in police custody.
If the Justice Department finds systemic civil rights violations, the investigations typically result in court-enforceable agreements between the federal government and the local community that serve as blueprints for change and are overseen by an independent monitor. The federal government has the option of suing a police department that is unwilling to make changes.
Cook County State’s Attorney Anita Alvarez, criticized for not filing charges earlier in the McDonald case, said she will speak Monday morning about the killing of another young black man by city police. Authorities say Ronald Johnson, 25, pointed a gun at police before an officer shot and killed him on October 12, 2014. His mother, Dorothy Holmes, said that wasn’t the case and that her son was running away from police. Emanuel has said the city would release video this week of Johnson’s shooting.
Emanuel has scheduled a Monday afternoon news conference on police accountability with interim Chicago Police Superintendent John Escalante and the new head of the Independent Police Review Authority, a city agency that investigates police cases. The mayor’s office announced late Sunday that the former head of that agency, Scott Ando, had resigned effective immediately.
Emanuel’s office said in a statement that while Ando had reduced the agency’s backlog of cases, “it has become clear that new leadership is required as we rededicate ourselves to dramatically improving our system of police accountability.” Ando will be replaced by Sharon Fairley, general counsel and first deputy of the city’s Office of the Inspector General and a former assistant U.S. attorney.
Chicago police released hundreds of pages in the McDonald case on Friday that show police officers reported a very different version of the encounter than the video shows, portraying McDonald as being more menacing than he appears in dashcam footage. That further angered activists and protesters, who were already accusing the city of a cover-up.
Emanuel acknowledged “the checkered history of misconduct in the Chicago Police Department” in an opinion column published in the Chicago Sun-Times and Chicago Tribune. “Chicago is facing a defining moment on the issues of crime and policing and the even larger issues of truth and justice,” Emanuel wrote. “To meet this moment, we need to conduct a painful but honest reckoning of what went wrong – not just in one instance, but over decades.”
The University of Chicago said last month that an analysis by its civil rights and police accountability clinic found of 56,000 complaints against Chicago police – but only a fraction led to disciplinary action. Among the most notorious cases, dozens of men, mostly African American, said they were subjected to torture from a Chicago police squad headed by former commander Jon Burge during the 1970s, 1980s and early 1990s. Burge was convicted of lying about the torture and served four and a half years in prison.
Of 409 shootings involving Chicago police since September 2007, only two have led to allegations against an officer being found credible, the Chicago Tribune reported, citing data from the Independent Police Review Authority.
Copyright 2015 The Associated Press
