Chicago's Top Cop Was Fired After the Laquan McDonald Shooting. Now He Wants to Be Mayor.

[DonViejo]

But to his opponents, Garry McCarthy’s aggressive style bears the blame for such police shootings.

By EDWARD MCCLELLAND September 29, 2018

Garry McCarthy wore the jacket.

In the lexicon of Chicago politics, “wearing the jacket” means taking the fall for a boss’ misdeeds. On the morning of December 1, 2015, McCarthy, then Chicago’s police superintendent, received a text message from Mayor Rahm Emanuel, summoning him to City Hall. “Here we go,” McCarthy told his driver, as he would later relate in a public radio documentary. “Let’s go get fired.”

A week earlier, the city had been forced to release a video of Officer Jason Van Dyke firing 16 shots at Laquan McDonald, a 17-year-old African-American boy who had been wandering around a street corner on the Southwest Side, breaking into trucks and slashing a police cruiser’s tire with a knife. The shooting had occurred more than a year earlier, in October 2014, but officials had managed to suppress it, citing ongoing police and FBI investigations. When the video finally came out, Chicagoans saw something very different from the accounts in the reports filed by officers on the scene, who had asserted that Van Dyke had fired in self-defense after McDonald lunged at him with the knife. The video instead showed the teenager wandering away from Van Dyke, who continued to pump bullets into McDonald even after he collapsed to the street like an unstrung marionette.

A few days after the video was released, on the first day of the Christmas shopping season, outraged protesters blocked entrances to stores on the Magnificent Mile, the city’s swanky retail district along Michigan Avenue, chanting, “Sixteen shots and a cover up!” They were led by African-American activists—a fact not lost on Emanuel, who had won both of his mayoral elections with a majority of the black vote.

When McCarthy stepped into Emanuel’s fifth floor City Hall office, the mayor asked him to resign. The superintendent, who was in the midst of making TV appearances defending his department’s conduct, refused. “No,” McCarthy says he told Emanuel. “I just told 2.8 million people that I’m not resigning, and I would resign if I did something wrong, or I was quitting, and I did neither.” So, Emanuel fired him, later telling a news conference that McCarthy “has become an issue rather than dealing with the issue, and a distraction.”

Ending McCarthy’s career was not enough to save Emanuel’s. By early 2016, the mayor’s approval in the black community had fallen to 30 percent, and he spent most of his second term trying to win it back, lavishing civic projects on the South and West sides. Yet on September 4, 2018, the day before jury selection began in Van Dyke’s trial, Emanuel announced he would not seek a third term. The mayor did not cite the trial as a reason for stepping down, but to many Chicagoans, especially African-Americans, the timing was no coincidence.

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https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2018/09/29/chicagos-ex-police-chief-was-fired-after-the-laquan-mcdonald-shooting-now-he-wants-to-be-mayor-220805

[mucifer]

1. There are about 50 candidates for Chicago mayor right now. It's pretty insane

ok I exaggerated a bit. But, so many people keep entering the race it's hard to keep track. mccarthy won't win.