[Watch the full remarks in the video above.]

Mayor Rahm Emanuel: This is a ‘whitewash of justice.’

“One thing is, not only do I support the hard work of our police officers, the detective unit, I’d like to remind everybody a grand jury indicted this individual based on only a piece of the evidence that the police had collected in that period of time. So the grand jury, actually, brought the charges. I think there are two things, three things I’d like to say.

One, on financial cost, this $10,000 doesn’t even come close to what the city spent in resources to actually look over the cameras, gather all the data, gather all the information that actually brought the indictment by the grand jury on many, many multiple different charges.

Second, is what I would call the ethical cost. The ethical cost is as a person who was in the House of Representatives when we tried to pass the Shepard legislation that dealt with hate crimes, putting them on the books, that President (Barack) Obama then signed into law; to then use those very laws and the principles and values behind the Matthew Shepard hate crimes legislation to self-promote your career is a cost that comes to all the individuals.

Gay men and women who will come forward and one day say they were a victim of a hate crime now will be doubted. People of faith — Muslim or any other religious faith who will be a victim of hate crimes; people of also, of all walks of life, of backgrounds, race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, now this casts a shadow of whether they’re telling the truth, and he did this all in the name of self-promotion. And he used the laws of the hate crime legislation that all of us collectively over years have put on the books to stand up to be the values that embody what we believe in.

This is a whitewash of justice. A grand jury could not have been clearer.

To then say, not only is the cost $10,000 doesn’t come close financially, but all the other repercussions of this decision made, I mean, where is the accountability in the system? You cannot have, because of a person’s position, one set of rules apply to them and another set of rules apply to everybody else.”

[Read the full remarks by the mayor.]