Pressure continues to mount on Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel over the handling of the case of a black teenager shot 16 times by the city’s police, one day after the mayor fired police superintendent Garry McCarthy.

Despite the public outcry over the handling of the case of 17-year-old Laquan McDonald, Emanuel has said he is not considering resigning over the scandal, which has led to widespread protests across the city throughout the last week.

“No,” Emanuel said when asked on Wednesday if he had plans to resign. “We have a process called the election. The voters spoke. I’ll be held accountable for the decisions and actions that I make.”



Laquan was shot 16 times by a Chicago police officer in November 2014. Police originally said the shooting was in self-defence, but footage from the dashboard camera of a police car released last week shows Laquan walking away from the officer when he was killed.



Emanuel dismissed McCarthy on Tuesday, citing the growing lack of trust in the department. Though he praised McCarthy’s leadership of the department, he said that as a police officer, McCarthy was “only as effective as the trust in him”. The police chief had, only days ago, insisted to reporters that the mayor had his “back”.

At the press conference on Tuesday, the mayor said that McCarthy’s resignation would be “not the end of the problem, but ... the beginning of the solution to the problem”. Emanuel also announced a six-person taskforce, including former Massachusetts governor Deval Patrick, which will do “a top-to-bottom review of the system”.

Questions have emerged about exactly when Emanuel watched the video of Laquan’s shooting. He has said that he only saw it a week before its release, despite his administration fighting a costly legal battle to prevent its release to the public for almost a year. In an interview with Politico, Emanuel said that he did not watch it so that he would avoid having to answer questions about it. “If I watched it reporters would say ‘if you get to see it, how come the public doesn’t get to see it’.”

Emanuel has also continued to be under pressure from politicians and activists to resign.



Cornell William Brooks, the chief executive of the NAACP, tweeted on Tuesday that “a change in leadership of the Chicago Police Dept is a step in the right direction”, but added that it was “not sufficient. We need far more”.



Filmmaker Spike Lee also spoke out against Emanuel at the New York premiere of his new film Chi-Raq that McCarthy would not be “the only one” to be fired, adding that “heads are gonna roll”. Lee clashed with Emanuel earlier this year when the mayor – the former chief of staff to Barack Obama – summoned the director to complain that the film’s title would hurt tourism.

Illinois attorney general Lisa Madigan called on Tuesday for the US Department of Justice to hold a wide-ranging investigation into the Chicago police department.

Additional reporting by Kevin Gosztola in Chicago