A little more than a year after Laquan McDonald, a 17-year-old African-American, was shot and killed in Chicago—many of the 16 bullets riddling his body while he was on the ground—he is once more dramatically in the news. But this time he won’t be so easily reduced to anonymity, with the video of his execution finally released and Police Superintendent Garry McCarthy forced to resign.
Under pressure from sustained demonstrations, Mayor Rahm Emanuel asked for McCarthy’s resignation Tuesday, charging that his role in a possible coverup of the crime had created a “distraction.” Officer Jason Van Dyke has been charged with first-degree murder, and according to several reports, he has a litany of complaints against him, including some very serious accusations.
Now that McCarthy is gone, there have been demands that Emanuel also step down. But the mayor has been defiant, insisting that he isn’t about to resign. “We have a process called the election,” he told reporters Wednesday. “The votes spoke. I’ll be held accountable for the decisions and actions that I make.”
He went on to say, “I don’t think this is the end of the problem. I think this is the beginning of the solution. And we’re going to work through this on a consistent basis to make the changes.”
Some of those changes are already in motion with his appointment of a task force to recommend new ideas and fresh thinking for police accountability. Protesters, however, said this effort is “too little, too late!”
The Rev. Jesse Jackson expressed his feelings in a statement about the shooting and the cover-up. “This is an act of suppressing evidence, which is shameful and adds to the distrust and fear of police officers. The attempt to cover up the shooting borders on the line of the act itself.”
Later, during an interview on MSNBC with Chris Hayes, Jackson said it wasn’t so much the mayor’s integrity, as his judgment in the matter. “There’s no justifiable reason for suppressing those tapes for 13 months,” he stated.
Jackson added, “I think that’s why the federal insight is so important. That all who saw the tape, who decided to suppress the tape for whatever reason they chose to do it, must also come under investigation. Without subpoena power, you will never get the truth about that.”
Jackson said the city should expect more protests until a special prosecutor is assigned and the federal investigation by the Justice Department begins.
Director Spike Lee, whose latest film “Chi-raq” is a current source of controversy in its depiction of Chicago’s violence as equivalent to that in Iraq, said that Emanuel should go. “They’re calling for Rahm’s neck, too—his head,” Lee told CNN’s Don Lemon. “A lot of questions have to be answered. Who made the decision? Why was this tape held for so long? And who saw the tape?”
In one way, the McDonald tragedy takes some of the heat off Lee’s film by shifting the focus to the Emanuel administration, but in another way, it merely underscores the ongoing violence, whether in the shooting death of 9-year-old Tyshawn Lee or the countless other Black-on-Black incidents that may have escaped the cameras.
