Meanwhile, not a single high-level official has been prosecuted. Rahm Emanuel, the Democratic mayor of Chicago, has worked with the entire political establishment to cover up their role in sanctioning police murders in Chicago and across the country.
Chicago police fatally shoot 37-year-old man
By George Marlowe
5 July 2017
Late
into the night of July 1, Chicago police shot and killed a man in the highly
impoverished Lawndale area of Chicago’s southwest side. While the Chicago
Police Department (CPD) claims he was heavily armed and confronting them, the
family are demanding the police body camera footage of the shooting be
released.
The
victim was 37-year-old Quintec Locke. After being shot by the police at 10:45
pm, he was taken to Mount Sinai hospital and died in the hospital at 12:26 am.
The autopsy produced by the Cook County Medical Examiner’s office revealed he
had died of multiple gunshot wounds.
Police
claim that he was armed with an AK-47 assault rifle and that they shot him in
the head when an “armed confrontation” broke out. Witnesses have contradicted
the official police statements, as is often the case in police-involved
shootings, and Locke’s family have denounced the police killing.
According
to witnesses, the officers did not announce themselves or ask Locke to drop his
weapon, and they dispute that he was shot in the head—witnesses claimed he was
shot in the back.
Speaking
to WGN-TV in Chicago, Eric Russell, who works with families of police-involved
shootings, stated that there are “several narratives” about what happened.
Russell
said that Locke may have been “shooting at some people he allegedly was having
an altercation with.” He added, however, that “The Chicago police acted as
judge, jury and executioner. He did not command [Quintec] to drop his gun or
announce himself. He didn’t kill anybody although he had a gun. Maybe he would
have surrendered.”
Other
witnesses have noted that gunshots are regularly heard in the neighborhood,
suggesting that Quintec may have not fired his weapon at all. Regardless,
Chicago police, as across the country, have a history of shooting to kill
without ever resorting to tactics of de-escalation. The actual body cam footage
may reveal more damning details, as is frequently the case with police-involved
shootings.
In
January, a Department of Justice (DOJ) investigation—following the cover-up of
the police murder of Laquan McDonald—came out with a scathing report
detailing a pattern or practice of use of force and violations of basic
constitutional rights by the CPD. The Justice report found that officers
frequently failed to de-escalate and carried out brutal and horrific crimes
against the working class and the poorest layers of the population, many of
them African-American and Hispanic.
Meanwhile,
not a single high-level official has been prosecuted. Rahm Emanuel, the
Democratic mayor of Chicago, has worked with the entire political establishment
to cover up their role in sanctioning police murders in Chicago and across the
country.
In
the wake of the exposure of the McDonald killing, all organizations of police
“oversight” and accountability, including the Independent Police Review
Authority (IPRA) and the Bureau of Internal Affairs (BIA), were found to be
implicated in the cover-up of police violence and brutality. The Justice report
revealed these so-called “independent” review organizations failed to
investigate the majority of cases that they are required to investigate.
While
IPRA is slated to be replaced by yet another “oversight” agency named the
Civilian Office of Police Accountability (COPA), this is widely seen as a cosmetic
facelift that will not produce any meaningful reform of the police
organization. No measures have been put into place which will guarantee any
form of genuine independent oversight of cover-ups of police violence by the
political establishment.
Recently,
three police officers were indicted by a special prosecutor for the murder and
cover-up of in the case of McDonald. Higher-level political figures such as
Emanuel have not been charged for their role in the cover-up at all. Neither
have charges been brought against the city’s aldermen, who paid the family
millions of dollars in order to suppress the video evidence of the brutal
murder, which show the police officers firing sixteen shots into his body.
Following
the murder of McDonald, Emanuel promised a series of steps that would reform
the CPD, which has a decades-long history of torture and abuse. In reality,
police murders and violence have continued under his watch despite all
pretenses of “reform.”
Recently,
Emanuel backed away the DOJ recommendation that the city of Chicago enter into
a court-enforced consent decree to enact police reform. Such court-enforced
measures have been used in other cities across the US, but have not
fundamentally stopped the national reign of police violence. Instead, Emanuel
has promised to work together with the Trump administration and Attorney
General Jeff Sessions on a toothless “memorandum of agreement” to reform the
department.
Under
the pretense of cracking down on gun violence, Democrats and Republicans are
calling for greater police enforcement across the state of Illinois. Emanuel,
who has met several times with Trump, is now working to expand a partnership
with the Trump administration
to bring more federal agents to Chicago to expand police powers.
According
to statistics of police murders, compiled by killedbypolice.net, more than 600
people have been killed so far this year. Over one thousand were killed in both
2016 and 2015.
In
the city of Denver and across the state of Colorado, there has been a spike of
police-involved shootings, with more than eight separate shootings by police
officers since June. Five of those incidents have resulted in fatalities. Last
Friday, police officers shot and killed a female carjacking suspect after a
long car chase spanning multiple cities. Another man was shot that same evening
by police, claiming he had a weapon. Not even an hour later, officers killed a
23-year-old man on a foot chase.
The
next day, officers from the Fort Collins Police Department and Colorado State
University police force shot and killed 19-year-old Jeremy Holmes near the
campus. According to his mother, Holmes suffered from schizophrenia. Police
claim he was armed with a knife before they shot and killed him.
A
30-year-old man was killed in Albuquerque, New Mexico, in a deadly
police-involved shooting. In Cincinnati, in the state Ohio, state troopers shot
and killed 36-year-old Dana Dubose, who police claimed was a suspect in a
homicide.
AMERICA: LAND OF FREE COP MURDERS ON INNOCENT PEOPLE
Of the 25 people shot to death by the police in
the past week,
beginning with Tyre King, at
least half were white, according to the
grisly
tally kept by killed by police.net.
Of the 702 people shot to death by police this
year, according
to a database maintained
by the Washington Post, 163 were
black men,
about 23 percent of the total. Whites made up
roughly half
the victims, while Hispanics,
Native Americans, Asians, black women
and people of mixed race made up
the balance.
'We are still in': Rahm Emanuel's futile and stupid virtue signaling
by Timothy Benson |
If
you are one of the poor, unfortunate souls who pays attention to public policy
or politics and spends any time on the Internet, you have surely heard the term
"virtue signaling."
Coined
by British journalist James Bartholomew, virtue signaling, according to the
Oxford Dictionary, is the "action or practice of publicly expressing
opinions or sentiments intended to demonstrate one's good character or the
moral correctness of one's position on a particular issue."
More
pithily, it's a cheap and easy way of showing off your own righteousness. Think
of it as a kind of conspicuous consumption for the politically correct.
What
set Bartholomew off was a poster in Whole Foods touting the company as
"part of a growing consciousness that is bigger than food — one that
champions what's good," virtue signaling is most virulent on social media.
Remember when all your heterosexual friends on Facebook added a rainbow filter
to their profile picture after the Obergefell v. Hodges decision was
delivered, or when everyone changed to the tricolor filter after the Charlie
Hebdo massacre? That's virtue signaling.
A
more topical example of virtue signaling — and one not exclusively confined to
social media — is the recent decision made by a group of mayors on behalf of
their cities to sign the "We Are Still In" pledge, a commitment to
meet the Paris climate accord's carbon-dioxide emissions reduction guidelines
despite President Trump's decision to withdraw the United States from the agreement.
In
Chicago, Mayor Rahm Emanuel tweeted out a picture of the city skyline lit up in
green "in honor" of the Paris accord and signed an executive order to
formalize the pledge.
Under
Emanuel's watch, Chicago has shrunk faster than any city in the country, with
its millionaires leading the exodus. The city's pension systems have been so
woefully underfunded they're now $40 billion in the hole; its bond rating is
literally junk, while Chicago Public Schools' rating is even junkier; and each
resident household is on the hook for more than $63,000 in local-government
debt. All this despite a record property tax increase passed in 2015 and
another looming around the corner.
To
top it all off, everyone within city limits is being murdered. (All right,
that's a bit of an exaggeration, but when the satirical newspaper The Onion can
write headlines like "City Of Chicago Working Around Clock to Clear 18
Inches of Bullet Casings from Streets," you know you have a problem.)
So,
yeah, Chicago is basically the municipal equivalent of that widely used
dumpster fire GIF, but Emanuel has more important things to worry about than
Chicago's long descent into becoming an insolvent killing zone: He has to let
the climate mandarins know that he's with them.
Emanuel's
office announced Chicago is going to play host to a climate summit in
conjunction with the "Global Covenant of Mayors for Climate and
Energy." The summit's planners say it will "bring together Mayors
from across the United States, Canada, and Mexico to outline each city's
respective commitments to the Paris Agreement on climate change via new
programs and initiatives."
Whatever
these "programs and initiatives" turn out to be, something tells me
they won't amount to substantial emissions decreases. Chicago already made one
futile and stupid emissions pledge under the previous mayor, Richard M. Daley,
saying the city would reduce its emissions 25 percent below 1990 levels by
2020. That pledge has gone so smoothly that Chicago is on pace to be 62 percent
above that emissions target by 2020.
Amusingly,
Emanuel's targets are actually weaker than the ones Daley had pledged. But
meeting the emissions targets is not the point. The point is to pretend you're
going to meet a target, bask in the accolades, and then ignore the pledge
entirely. In other words, virtue signaling.
Emanuel,
like Daley before him, will end up getting exactly what he wants: to take a
victory lap and be feted for being an enlightened, progressive environmental
steward, and to have no one notice when it all turns out to be a sham.
Timothy
Benson (tbenson@heartland.org) is a policy analyst with The Heartland
Institute, a nonprofit, nonpartisan free-market think tank headquartered in
Arlington Heights, Illinois.
Thinking
of submitting an op-ed to the Washington Examiner? Be sure to read our guidelines
on submissions.
By George Gallanis
The history of the police in the Democratic
Party stronghold that is Chicago is filled with
horrific stories of abject brutality and murder
followed by massive coverups.
Latest Chicago police killing shrouded in secrecy
By George Gallanis
11 July 2017
As warm sunlight draped North Leclaire Avenue on Chicago’s northwest side Sunday morning, a hail of police bullets trailed a fleeing man. With at least one bullet eventually striking him, the man would die at a local hospital.
The as yet unidentified man is the eighth person killed by the Chicago police this year, almost one week since the last. He was, according to killedbypolice.net, the 637th person to die by police violence in the United States. As of this writing, the total count stands at 641.
Very little information on the incident exists. In fact, as is customary for most police shootings in an effort to temporarily quell social anger, the current official account of the story will likely change in the coming weeks.
The history of the police in the Democratic Party stronghold that is Chicago is filled with horrific stories of abject brutality and murder followed by massive coverups. As it was with the cover up of the murder of Laquan McDonald by Chicago police, what has officially been said and what will be said about the latest killing should both be treated with utter contempt.
According to the Chicago police, the incident began when the mother of the unidentified man informed police early Sunday morning that the man was holding his girlfriend and her child against their will in a house on the northwest side of the city.
Police eventually surrounded the home, with highly militarized SWAT units called onsite to wait on standby if needed to forcibly enter the home by way of flash bangs and heavy weaponry. However, the man let the woman and child go.
Afterwards, according to the police and major news outlets such as ABC, the man allegedly stepped out of the house, fired upon the police, with one cop firing back, and made his way down the street on foot. Such a story defies common sense. How was he allowed to get away unscathed when an arsenal of police and SWAT members surrounded him?
There are more questions to be asked. Afterwards, according to the official account of the police, the man climbed to the roof of a house, and jumped into a gangway, causing his weapon to discharge. Yet, police say, he then intentionally fired upon the cops, after which he was fatally wounded.
A witness to the incident tells a different story. “They were using some code words for positioning themselves, after that that’s when one shot came at them and then after that they shot several shots. It was over just like that,” said Gilberto Morales, a local resident. According to Morales, only one shot was fired by the suspect before his death. Was the “one shot” that “came at them” the bullet which was unintentionally fired after the man fell into the gangway?
Quick to justify the killing as act of self-defense, a spokeswoman for Independent Police Review Authority (IPRA), Mia Sissac, told the press. “It’s still too early to say anything definitive except that shots were fired at officers, and officers returned fire.”
Sissac’s statement reveals the absolute bankruptcy of IPRA, an oversight and police accountability organization, which will investigate the incident for any wrongdoing by the police. But it will find none. IPRA’s history consists of one coverup after another. It played a leading role, in close collaboration with Chicago’s Democratic mayor, Rahm Emanuel, in the coverup of Laquan McDonald’s murder by Chicago police. IPRA found no wrongdoing then.
Acting on behalf of both the Democrats and Republicans, the two parties of big business, police operate as the most blatant expression of the violence of class rule. Responsibility for the senseless murders of hundreds of people does not stop at the police, but must include above all the political parties which control and rely on them to maintain the status quo and above all to suppress opposition from the working class.
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