CHICAGO'S CONTINUING SCANDALS OVER POLICE ACCOUNTABILTY & AT LEAST ONE VICTORY

One peek into how police accountability doesn't work in Chicago, and in many other cities was unveiled a few months ago.
"In November, the city released a video that showed Laquan McDonald, a black teenager, being shot 16 times by Jason Van Dyke, a white cop. The footage was gruesome. But the routine way in which the October 2014 killing was covered up for more than a year exposed a deeper culture of secrecy and impunity in Chicago that implicated the entire police force and much of the city’s government. . . "

Many blacks are outraged and have demanded Democratic Mayor Rahm Emanuel's resignation. "Yet the very communities most in need of public safety have come to see the criminal-justice system as another deadly threat. A scathing report issued on April 13 by a task force the mayor appointed confirmed that their distrust of the police was warranted — “C.P.D.’s own data gives validity to the widely held belief the police have no regard for the sanctity of life when it comes to people of color,” the task force found."

There was one victory, a prosecutor complicit in the scandals was voted out of office.  The "Cook County state’s attorney [was voted out of office].  Alvarez didn’t charge Van Dyke until a judge, nearly 400 days after the shooting, forced the city to make the McDonald video public. Alvarez had led in polls three weeks earlier, but demonstrators shut down her public talks, rallied at her fund-raisers and started a social-media campaign — #ByeAnita — that laid out how she had failed in her duties as a prosecutor. Alvarez lost by 30 percentage points to a political novice."

"Chicago had more fatal shootings by the police than any other American city from 2010 to 2014, according to an analysis by the Better Government Association. Yet members of the Chicago Police Department have faced hardly any punishment. Of the 409 shootings by police officers investigated since 2007 by the Independent Police Review Authority (IPRA), which is charged with looking into serious claims of misconduct, only two of the shootings were found to be unjustified."