Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel announced on Tuesday that he had asked the city’s police superintendent, Garry McCarthy, to resign, and created a task force to look into the police department’s practices and fragile relations with the city's African-American community.
Tuesday’s press conference follows the release of a video that depicted police officers shooting Laquan McDonald, a black teenager, 16 times, in a 2014 incident. For the past year, the Chicago Police Department had refused to publicly release the video, and only relented after ordered by a judge to make the footage public.
“At this point in this juncture with the city, given what we’re working on, he has become an issue rather than dealing with an issue. He’s a distraction,” Emanuel said of McCarthy.
Protesters had been calling for McCarthy’s resignation for the past several weeks, but the release of the video added further weight to those calls: the Chicago Sun-Times recently published a strong op-ed demanding his resignation, and opinion pieces published in several others, including The New York Times, accused Emanuel himself of attempting to suppress the footage to increase his own chances of re-election in late 2014.
While the mayor did not respond to questions regarding calls for his own resignation, he acknowledged his role in not holding the police department accountable for its actions: “I’m responsible. I don’t shirk that responsibility.”
To that end, he announced the creation of an independent task force to investigate the Chicago Police Department that will, according to a statement released by his office, “review the system of accountability, oversight, and training that is currently in place for Chicago's police officers.”
Emanuel, who hired McCarthy in 2011 from the Newark Police Department, praised his record in Chicago, but added that there were bigger problems to address: “I have a loyalty to what he’s done, but I have a bigger loyalty to the city of Chicago and its future.”
Right before the video was released, Officer Jason Van Dyke, who claimed that the 17-year-old had lunged at him with a knife, was charged with McDonald’s murder.
