By Bill Ruthhart, Chicago Tribune

01 December 15

or the last week, Mayor Rahm Emanuel has been under intense pressure from protesters and fellow elected officials in Chicago — and from activists and pundits across the country — to clean up his Police Department and fire his top cop, Garry McCarthy, following the release of a video that showed a white officer repeatedly shooting a black teenager in the street, killing him.

On Tuesday, Emanuel will seek to quell some of the growing chorus of criticism by announcing a task force his administration says “will review the system of accountability, oversight and training that is currently in place for Chicago’s police officers,” according to a brief news release issued late Monday.

Appointing a committee to look into an issue is a tried-and-true tactic elected officials long have employed to buy time and breathing room when faced with a scandal or crisis. In this case, Emanuel will give the yet-to-be-named panel four months to make recommendations for changes in the Chicago Police Department.

Calling for a task force is unlikely to alleviate repeated calls for McCarthy’s firing or tamp down the #resignrahm hashtag that has surged on social media in recent days. But it gives Emanuel something else to talk to reporters and the public about other than the viral video of 17-year-old Laquan McDonald being shot repeatedly by Officer Jason Van Dyke, much of it with the teenager lying in the middle of Pulaski Road on the Southwest Side.

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Fueling the firestorm is the fact that Emanuel fought for the better part of a year not to release the police dashboard camera video of the shooting. It wasn’t until a Cook County judge on Nov. 19 ruled that Emanuel and his administration had violated the state’s open records law and ordered the video to be released to the public that the mayor agreed to do so.

In addition, State’s Attorney Anita Alvarez filed a first-degree murder charge against Van Dyke, who she alleged shot McDonald 16 times in 14 seconds, only after the judge ordered the city to release the video — 13 months after the Oct. 20, 2014, shooting.Emanuel has argued he didn’t release the recording for fear of interfering with the investigation, though Judge Franklin Valderrama ruled there were no grounds for such a position. And Alvarez has maintained she was waiting for federal investigators to wrap up their own investigation, but finally decided to move forward on her own out of concern for “public safety” after Emanuel was ordered to release the shooting video.

But the slow pace of the investigation, Emanuel’s refusal for months to release the video, a lack of discernible audio from police videos of the shooting and an 86-minute gap in surveillance video at a nearby Burger King at the time of the shooting have led to cover-up accusations lobbed by everyone from the city’s aldermen and activists to op-ed columnists and TV commentators across the country. It’s also led to a week of street demonstrations, including a highly publicized march down Michigan Avenue on Friday that shut down many stores on the busiest shopping day of the year.

At the eye of the storm is McCarthy. The City Council Black Caucus, several Latino aldermen, Cook County Board President Toni Preckwinkle and the editorial boards of the Sun-Times and Washington Post all have called for McCarthy to be fired.

“THIS TIME in Chicago, the police cover-up failed,” the Post’s editorial begins before later turning its attention to McCarthy. “It was the police who maintained a code of silence despite at least seven other officers who witnessed the shooting at close range. That’s outrageous and should lead to further criminal inquiries and the immediate firing of the city’s police superintendent, Garry McCarthy.”

During September budget hearings, the black caucus called for McCarthy’s ouster and did so again last week. On Monday, Preckwinkle joined them, saying she’d suggested to Emanuel that he fire McCarthy. Preckwinkle said McCarthy either knew or should have known months ago that the initial story presented in the case was not true and that McDonald did not lunge at police before Van Dyke shot him.                                                  source