Shortly after taking office, Mayor Rahm Emanuel and new police Superintendent Garry McCarthy faced one of the city’s worst police shootings in recent memory: a cop captured on video fatally shooting an unarmed African-American man in the back as he lay on the ground.

The city paid $4.1 million to the victim’s family and McCarthy said the officer, who had recently shot two other people, should not have been on the street given his history.

In the four years following that vivid introduction to police misconduct, Emanuel and McCarthy have failed to enact systemic change in a department with a long history of excessive force and misconduct. On Tuesday, that cost McCarthy his job, dismissed by a mayor seeking to ease public outrage over the police video recording of a black teen shot 16 times by a white officer now charged with murder.

“Superintendent McCarthy knows that a police officer is only as effective as when he has the trust of those he serves,” Emanuel said at a morning news conference, saying he discussed with McCarthy “the undeniable fact that the public trust in the leadership of the department has been shaken and eroded.”


But the furor that erupted in the seven days since the city released the video of Laquan McDonald’s death and prosecutors charged Officer Jason Van Dyke has focused as much on Emanuel as on his now-former police chief.

While he hired McCarthy on his promise to reform and refocus the police force, Emanuel left in place leaders who had climbed the ladder as the department earned a national reputation for corruption, abuse and resistance to oversight. The mayor sought to erase the 2012 verdict of a federal jury that found a police “code of silence” protected bad cops. He declined to take a public stand even as McCarthy defended an off-duty detective who killed an unarmed woman when he fired into a crowd, another case that drew protests and national attention.

And while Emanuel publicly called on Cook County prosecutor Anita Alvarez to wrap up her investigation of the McDonald shooting, the police watchdog agency that answers to him has still not issued its own ruling in the case.

Even as he dismissed McCarthy and appointed a task force to recommend new ideas for police accountability, critics said it was too late for City Hall to fix the problems alone.


Illinois Attorney General Lisa Madigan asked U.S. Attorney General Loretta Lynch to launch a Justice Department civil rights investigation into the Police Department’s use of deadly force and the adequacy of its review of such cases.

“I write to you with urgency,” Madigan said in her letter to Lynch. “Trust in the Chicago Police Department is broken, especially in communities of color in the City of Chicago.”

Locke Bowman, a Northwestern University law professor who has for years challenged Chicago police misconduct, said he was hard-pressed to recall any improvements the mayor had made to the system of police accountability during his time in office.

Bowman, the head of the MacArthur Justice Center, pointed to the failure of the Independent Police Review Authority, the agency that investigates allegations of police misconduct, to sustain allegations against cops, including Van Dyke, in the vast majority of cases.


“Van Dyke has over a dozen complaints against him, including some very serious ones,” Bowman said. “IPRA’s never disciplined him.

“If you had an agency that tracked repeat offender cops and looked at the most recent allegations in light of the history, this is a guy who should have been taken off the street before this ever happened,” Bowman said. “An effective disciplinary apparatus could have prevented Laquan McDonald’s killing.”

The images of Van Dyke pumping round after round into the body of the 17-year-old McDonald, many of them as he lay in the street, quickly became international news, with Chicago becoming the latest example of a young African-American dying unjustifiably at the hands of a white police officer in America.

Such deaths, many of them also caught on video, have driven the Black Lives Matter movement over the last year and the subsequent protests and national discussion on urban policing.


But for many Chicagoans, the story of McDonald’s death represented an all-too-familiar set of circumstances at home: City Hall casts the incident as police self-defense only for the facts to bear out a much different story later on.

For much of the last year, Emanuel and his lawyers fought in court to keep a police dashboard camera video of the shooting under wraps, arguing that releasing it publicly could interfere with a state’s attorney and federal investigations into the shooting.

But when a Cook County judge’s ruling forced the mayor to release the video to the public last week, the fallout for McCarthy and Emanuel was sharp and immediate.

Protesters took to the streets chanting “16 shots!” and on Friday blocked entry to Magnificent Mile stores on one of the busiest shopping days of the year. Black aldermen called for McCarthy to be fired. Cook County Board President Toni Preckwinkle urged Emanuel to do the same. Some Latino aldermen followed suit, as did newspaper editorial writers, television commentators, columnists and activists from around the country.


Since 2011, Emanuel and McCarthy have stood together through rocky patches, including a major spike in homicides and a number of high-profile murders and shootings of young children caught in the gang gunfire of Chicago’s most violent neighborhoods. But amid the protests and public backlash, Emanuel called McCarthy into his City Hall office Tuesday morning and asked him to resign.

The mayor said McCarthy had a record to be proud of, citing his work to reduce crime rates and remove guns from the street. But Emanuel also sought to turn the page, announcing First Deputy Superintendent John Escalante would serve as acting superintendent during a “thorough” search by the Emanuel-appointed Police Board, which will recommend candidates for the mayor to interview.

“Now is the time for fresh eyes and new leadership to confront the challenges the department and our community and our city are facing as we go forward,” Emanuel said. “This is not the end of the problem, but it is the beginning to the solution to the problem. There are systematic challenges that will require sustained reforms.”


Emanuel’s comments about the department were much more broad than what he said as recently as last week, when both the mayor and McCarthy portrayed the shooting as the case of a rogue officer and not reflective of a departmentwide problem.

But that one-bad-apple narrative didn’t square with Chicago’s sordid police history that once again was back in the national spotlight. Serving as the backdrop: decades’ worth of police torture and wrongful conviction cases, corruption and ineffectual oversight in shootings and other excessive force actions. Time and again, the department had quickly cleared officers of allegations, only to have civil litigation later reveal video and other evidence that painted a much darker picture of police misconduct.

The task force Emanuel now has appointed to examine the department contains Chicago law enforcement veterans, including some whose tenures coincide with controversies at the Police Department.

The panel’s one former Chicago police official, Hiram Grau, is a retired deputy superintendent who left the department in 2008 for other executive law enforcement jobs. Grau was never personally tainted by scandal, but he had a long career in CPD and rose through the ranks to occupy top posts during years that were rampant with police misconduct scandals — including the police cover-up of the video-recorded Anthony Abbate bar beating case and numerous questionable shootings.


Grau was present at a controversial meeting when police officials were discussing how to handle the video, according to court records, but has never been accused of acting inappropriately in the case.

In the lawsuit over that case, a federal jury found department officials had colluded to cover up the beating and a “code of silence” in the department protected rogue officers from facing discipline over misconduct.

Emanuel responded to the 2012 verdict by trying to strike a deal with the plaintiff — bartender Karolina Obrycka — in which the city would promise not to appeal her $850,000 jury award in exchange for her support in vacating the verdict to erase the “code of silence” language from the court record. The judge in the case refused Emanuel’s move, ruling it was not in the public’s interest.

Also appointed to the new panel was Lori Lightfoot, Emanuel’s current president of the Chicago Police Board that disciplines officers, and a former director of the Office of Professional Standards — the precursor to IPRA that then-Mayor Richard M. Daley rebranded in 2007 because of its ineffectiveness in rooting out police misconduct.


While Emanuel inherited a troubled Police Department from Daley’s 22-year administration, he had not instituted major reforms to oversight of officer conduct. Talking points the mayor’s office circulated Tuesday noted that police officials fully cooperate with IPRA’s shooting investigations, while doing their own review of the cases “to learn how similar incidents could be avoided or best handled in the future.”

People dance during a rally to recognize the dismissal of Chicago Police Superintendent Garry McCarthy, at Chicago Police headquarters Tuesday, Dec. 1, 2015, in Chicago. (John J. Kim / Chicago Tribune)

The reality is different. A 2007 Tribune investigation of the department’s police-shooting investigation practices found that the initial internal police reviews of shootings quickly clear officers of any wrongdoing in nearly every case, often before critical forensic evidence can be analyzed.

Former IPRA investigator Lorenzo Davis filed a lawsuit against the city this summer alleging that IPRA officials tampered with cases in which investigators sustained allegations of wrongdoing by police in shootings. Davis alleges that IPRA’s chief administrator, who was appointed by Emanuel, fired him because he refused to reverse his findings in six cases where he found shootings were unjustified, according to court papers. The agency has denied those allegations.


In another police shooting incident on Emanuel’s watch, Detective Dante Servin shot and killed Rekia Boyd in 2012 while firing into a crowd, over his shoulder from his vehicle in an early morning, off-duty incident near his West Side home. Servin initially had been cleared in that shooting by the Police Department, which claimed the man at whom he shot had a gun. In fact, he had a cellphone.

Alvarez filed involuntary manslaughter charges in the case, only for the judge to acquit Servin on a legal fine point, all but saying that the officer should have been charged with murder instead. Still, McCarthy insisted that Servin should not have been charged in the case that drew headlines across the country.

Emanuel was asked at the time whether he agreed with McCarthy’s comments but refused to weigh in on the matter, citing IPRA’s investigation of the shooting. When IPRA later recommended Servin be fired, McCarthy took two months before moving to fire the detective — a decision that happened only after a judge ruled that the city would have to release the police video in the McDonald case.

The Emanuel administration fought for much of a year against the video’s public release, arguing in court that it was exempt from the state’s open records law because of an ongoing investigation. Releasing the video could interfere with the case, city lawyers argued.


But the judge rejected the city’s argument, pointing out that by its own admission, the Police Department no longer had an open investigation pending in the shooting and was not a party to IPRA’s case or a joint probe by the state’s attorney’s and FBI. Moreover, Judge Frank Valderrama wrote, the city failed to prove that releasing the video would have interfered with the case in any way.

On Tuesday, Emanuel was asked why he hadn’t sought sweeping changes in the Police Department and only sought to address those issues after the release of the video and a week of protests. “I beg to differ with that,” Emanuel responded. “There’s a long history. We have made progress, but our work is not done.”

In hiring McCarthy, Emanuel sought a credible voice, a superintendent who came to Chicago after stints as a top commander in New York City and as the chief in Newark, N.J., where he built a career on using a combination of cutting-edge statistical trends and intelligence to knock back violent crime. Never hesitant to talk tough about gangs or guns in front of a microphone, McCarthy was the face of the Police Department, often taking pressure off the mayor to address crime issues.

McCarthy’s familiar New York accent, close-cropped haircut and thick mustache quickly made him well-known in the city, particularly after he spearheaded City Hall’s largely successful response to the 2012 NATO summit that brought scores of international leaders, and days of large-scale protests, to Chicago. In fact, afterward, a Chicago Tribune poll showed McCarthy had a higher approval rating in the city than his boss, Emanuel.


But as his tenure as Chicago’s top cop wore on, McCarthy struggled to reduce violence after the department withstood years of budget cuts. A move early in his tenure to disband teams of officers that had flooded high-crime areas in an effort to meet an Emanuel goal of adding 1,000 additional officers on beat patrol helped contribute to a sharp spike in homicides in 2013.

McCarthy had become embattled even before the release of the McDonald video and the subsequent fallout. During October budget hearings this fall, the City Council’s Black Caucus called on Emanuel to fire McCarthy, citing a failure to address ongoing violence in their communities.

“Look, I’ve been around this business for a long time. Every once in a while, these things happen,” McCarthy said of the aldermen’s calls for him to resign at the time. Asked if he was going to change his approach to the job, he responded, “We’re going to continue doing what we’re doing. The focus has to increase. We’re always striving for that.”

In the face of the McDonald controversy and calls for McCarthy’s firing in the week following the release of the video, Emanuel stood behind his only police superintendent. As late as 8 a.m. Tuesday, McCarthy was on the radio talking about the Laquan McDonald shooting and praising the mayor’s task force plan.


“How am I? I’m a little busy and a little bit stressed out, but staying the course,” McCarthy said when asked how he was doing by WGN-AM 720’s Steve Cochran.

Moments after that interview, McCarthy got a call from the mayor’s office, instructing him to cancel a remaining television interview and report to Emanuel’s fifth floor City Hall office. In a short, 10-minute meeting between the two men, Emanuel asked McCarthy for his resignation and got it.

Chicago Tribune’s Hal Dardick and Jeremy Gorner contributed.

bruthhart@tribpub.com


dheinzmann@tribpub.com