raydawg
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A very interesting tidbit about the shooting.....
If these accusations are true, I think this is EXACTLY what the BLM people mean......
The mayor of Chicago talked a lot about accountability just before he released the police video showing Laquan McDonald gunned down by a cop.
But what of the mayor's accountability? He sat on the video for months. If voters had seen it, he wouldn't have been re-elected. So it all worked out for him.
And where is the accountability of African-American politicos and others like the Rev. Jesse Jackson, so loud now, pointing their fingers and organizing meetings and demanding accountability from others?
When it mattered, they were silent. They didn't demand that the video be released. Why?
Because this is Chicago and that's how it works.
"Jason Van d**e's going to court," Emanuel said Tuesday of the officer charged earlier in the day with murder in the first degree.
"There will be a judgment and he'll be held accountable for his actions," the mayor said, in a thin voice that had a whiff of desperation in it. "There's also a judgment for all of us. At one level it's about him individually, but we as a city must also do certain things."
Like tell the truth?
Warning, graphic content: Laquan McDonald shooting dash-cam video: short version
Warning graphic content: Chicago officials released the police dash-cam video of the October 2014 fatal shooting of Laquan McDonald, 17, by a Chicago police officer. Warning: This video contains graphic images. The Chicago Tribune edited this version only for length.
I watched the video, as many of you did. Until it was released to the public, the mayor insisted he hadn't seen it, even though he called it "hideous" the other day.
The important parts last only a few seconds. It is one of the worst things I've seen, like those old "Faces of Death" videos that were viral before viral was a word, tapes of people dying, something creepy that high school kids once watched in their basements alone.
Now, of course, that kind of thing is fed to you for breakfast on the news.
There is no drama to McDonald's last seconds, no sound, not even the smack of bullets, only the thing itself: a white cop shooting a young black man to death on the streets of Chicago.
According to Cook County State's Attorney Anita Alvarez, it took only 15 seconds.
Van d**e shoots him on the ground, repeatedly. You see the puffs of pavement fly up as the bullets go through McDonald's body and hit the ground. You see his arms twitch. A cop walks over and kicks a knife out of McDonald's hand, and the teen lies there, bleeding out, without anyone coming up to offer aid.
Chicago releases dash-cam video of fatal shooting after cop charged with murder
Chicago releases dash-cam video of fatal shooting after cop charged with murder
There may be efforts to make Laquan McDonald, 17 and with PCP in his system, into some kind of icon as the protesters begin to make noise. It's part of the script that has been used before. I won't do that.
But I will tell you this. He was a troubled young man who didn't deserve what happened to him. And he didn't deserve what the cop took from him, which was everything.
If you see the video, and if you're honest with yourself, this isn't self-defense.
Alvarez called it murder. That's what it looks like to me.
McDonald didn't lunge at police with a knife. He was trying to get away, as an eyewitness to the killing confirmed for me in a recent column.
And Van d**e emptied his 9 mm into him when he was on the ground. Then Van d**e slapped another magazine in there, prosecutors said, and was ready to keep firing.
Horrific? Yes. Perhaps the mayor should finally see it.
But while we're waiting, that business of the mayor telling others that they are accountable is interesting.
Who holds Rahm Emanuel accountable?
He's the mayor. He's the man. He can throw others under the bus. That thought had to be going through police Superintendent Garry McCarthy's mind as he stood there, at police headquarters Tuesday afternoon, listening to the mayor talk about accountability.
McDonald was shot to death by Van d**e on Oct. 20, 2014. And Emanuel rushed to settle the case even before a lawsuit was filed. City Hall shelled out $5 million of taxpayer money.
And then the Emanuel administration wasted a boatload of cash on legal fees and other legal work, trying for months and months to keep Chicago from seeing that video the mayor said he'd never seen.
Rahm sat on the video, and kept sitting on it, all the way through his re-election, as black ministers and other African-American political figures rallied to his side to get out the black vote and deny that vote to Jesus "Chuy" Garcia.
If the video had come out during the election campaign, Rahm Emanuel would not be mayor today.
Rahm didn't demand that the video be shown, and neither did the Chicago City Council's Black Caucus. They voted for the $5 million settlement.
But if they'd demanded that the video be shown — before the election — Rahm would have cut them off at their knees.
I didn't hear Kim Foxx — Cook County Board President Toni Preckwinkle's candidate for state's attorney — demand that the video be made public either.
I didn't hear Preckwinkle and Foxx hold a news conference, with all their supporters around them back when the case was settled in April, speaking in loud, angry tones about accountability and City Hall and that video.
And I didn't hear Jackson — now trying to use this police shooting to re-legitimize himself and help Foxx — demand that the video be released.
Or other black leaders, who like most of the rest are covering their behinds, pointing fingers at others, lest the people of Chicago be reminded that many of them had Rahm's back, or at least never made a peep out loud about that video.
The art of politics in Chicago is demanding accountability for others, but never for yourself.
jskass@tribpub.com
Twitter @John_Kass
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