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Chicago Releases Videos of Police Shootings | |
(about 2 hours later) | |
CHICAGO — Chicago officials on Friday released hundreds of videos and other investigative materials from 101 cases in which police officers injured or killed civilians — a sharp turnaround for an administration that fought for a year not to release a video showing an officer fatally shooting a teenager as he lay sprawled on the ground. | |
Many of the videos, recorded by police dashboard cameras, business surveillance cameras and bystanders’ cellphones, were blurry or grainy and showed little. But a handful of others contain stark images of the kind of violent — and sometimes deadly — encounters that critics of the Chicago Police Department say are all too common. | |
In a 2014 video, officers shoot into a vehicle, wounding a man, Michael Cote, who was trying to get away. A video from 2012 shows officers confronting a man, Ismael Jamison, who was apparently behaving erratically and reportedly had been hitting people. The officers shoot him and also use an electric stun weapon; Mr. Jamison, 28, survived. Videos from 2015 show an officer in plain clothes beating a man, Terrence Clarke, who was eating with his family in a restaurant, after Mr. Clarke complained about his meal, and then saying that Mr. Clarke had attacked him. | |
In a case from 2012, surveillance video shows three men inside an electronics business, apparently robbing it, loading a minivan, and then crashing it through a closed garage door, nearly hitting officers who were standing outside. Officers can be seen shooting at the van — one ejects a spent magazine and reloads — killing one man, David Strong, 27, and wounding two others, Leland Dudley, 33 and John Givens, 32. The two survivors were charged with homicide because Mr. Strong died during their commission of a felony; and they later sued the city for excessive force. | |
The videos’ release by Chicago’s Independent Police Review Authority, which investigates claims of misconduct and excessive force, was very unusual for a city whose Police Department has a reputation for secrecy. Chicago officials waited until November — after a judge’s order — to release a video taken about a year earlier that showed Officer Jason Van Dyke, who is white, shooting 17-year-old Laquan McDonald, who was black, 16 times. Officer Van Dyke was charged with murder in the on-duty shooting. | |
Long-strained relations between the Chicago police and residents, especially African-Americans, boiled over after the release of the McDonald video. Since then, the city has experienced a marked increase in bloodshed. Shootings are up by 50 percent for the year, with hundreds injured and more than 230 people dead. There are indications that the department is getting little cooperation from mistrustful citizens, making it harder to solve crimes on the streets. | |
Police conduct, and the city’s handling of it, have become a political crisis for Chicago’s leaders, including Mayor Rahm Emanuel, who faced accusations that he did not want the McDonald video made public while he was in a re-election fight, which he won only narrowly. For months after the video’s release, he faced calls for his resignation. Mr. Emanuel appointed a task force to look into police practices, and dismissed the city’s police superintendent. | |
In March, Anita Alvarez, the state’s attorney for Cook County, the prosecutor who waited 13 months before taking action against Officer Van Dyke, was ousted by voters. | |
The Justice Department has begun an investigation into the Police Department, and the mayor’s task force issued a scathing report saying that racism had contributed to a long pattern of institutional failures by a department that had lost the trust of residents. | |
In a statement on Friday, Mr. Emanuel said the release of the new materials was “a major step forward to promote transparency, and it makes us one of the leading cities in America to guarantee timely public access to this breadth of information involving sensitive police incidents.” But, he added, “we know there is a lot more work to do.” | |
The 101 cases, 68 of which had video, include every open investigation into officer-involved shootings — whether anyone was hit or not — and every case in which a civilian was killed or seriously injured by a Taser, according to officials on the review board, who are appointed by the mayor. The cases also include every open investigation into deaths or serious injuries of people in police custody. | |
It was not always clear what the videos were showing. | |
The video of Mr. Jamison, for example, “left me with more questions than answers,” said Maria Haberfeld, a professor of police science at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York, who analyzed the recordings. | |
“There’s this guy who is walking around, very agitated,” she said. “And there’s suddenly a police officer holding a gun, pointing a gun at this individual — but I don’t see where he’s arrived from, if there was some type of exchange before.” | |
Officials from the police review authority emphasized that they were not making any judgments about whether excessive force or other misconduct occurred in any of the cases, which are all still under investigation. And they did not single out any cases with the potential to become the most controversial. | |
Instead, the officials emphasized their hope that disclosing the videos and other materials from the investigative files would make people in the community more confident in the procedures for investigating police misconduct. | |
“These past few months, as the city has struggled with so many questions about policing and about police accountability, it has been clear that we all agree that there is a lack of trust, and that increased transparency is essential to rebuilding that trust,” said Sharon Fairley, the police review authority’s chief administrator. “Today represents an important first step toward that.” | “These past few months, as the city has struggled with so many questions about policing and about police accountability, it has been clear that we all agree that there is a lack of trust, and that increased transparency is essential to rebuilding that trust,” said Sharon Fairley, the police review authority’s chief administrator. “Today represents an important first step toward that.” |
Whatever confidence once existed was shattered in many quarters after a court in November ordered the release of video of Mr. McDonald’s shooting, more than a year after he was killed. Officer Van Dyke was not charged in the case until the release of the graphic and disturbing video was imminent. | Whatever confidence once existed was shattered in many quarters after a court in November ordered the release of video of Mr. McDonald’s shooting, more than a year after he was killed. Officer Van Dyke was not charged in the case until the release of the graphic and disturbing video was imminent. |