For the third time in two months, the city of Chicago has been compelled to release footage of police fatally shooting a black teenager or young man.
The city's law department on Thursday released three videos of the 2013 shooting of unarmed 17-year-old Cedrick Chatman. A federal judge ruled earlier that day that the videos had to be made public, ending a three-year battle between the city and Chatman's family.
The low-quality video shows the teen running away as a plainclothes officer fires his weapon. At the time of the shooting, official police accounts claimed that Chatman was armed and pointed a gun at police, causing at least one of the two pursuing officers to “fear for his life.” Chatman was later found to be unarmed and holding a black iPhone box.
Chicago officials fought to keep the video under protective order, arguing that it would inflame the public and unfairly sway the jury in a trial over the family's wrongful death lawsuit.
That argument lost its impact after the high-profile release of the Laquan McDonald shooting footage on Nov. 24. That video, which the city also fought to keep from public view, shows a cop shooting 17-year-old McDonald 16 times as he walks away.
Since November, the city has also released footage of the 2012 police shooting of Ronald Johnson, 25, as well as surveillance video showing 38-year-old Philip Coleman, a black man who died in police custody, being Tasered and roughly handled by officers.
The videos come amid a period of intense scrutiny of Mayor Rahm Emanuel and the city's police and law departments over how Chicago handles cases of police misconduct. The U.S. Department of Justice is now investigating the CPD.
Chatman's family was not immediately available for comment Thursday, but they are moving forward with a wrongful death lawsuit against the city and against Officer Kevin Fry, who shot the teen.
Neither Fry nor his partner at the scene, Officer Lou Toth, were disciplined. Chicago's Independent Police Review Authority, a city agency tasked with investigating and disciplining police complaints, cleared the officers of wrongdoing, as it nearly always does.
Supervising investigator Lorenzo Davis, a 24-year veteran of the Chicago police force, disagreed with that decision and called Thursday's video release a "vindication."
In an agency where cops are rarely punished, Davis was accused of having an anti-police bias and was fired in July. Davis was the "only supervisor at IPRA who resist[ed] making requested changes as directed by management in order to reflect the correct finding with respect to [officer-involved shootings]," according to performance records obtained by WBEZ.
Davis is currently suing the city for wrongful termination.
Reached at his home on Chicago's South Side, Davis told The Huffington Post Thursday that he stands by his assessment of Fry and Toth and that they should have resorted to several other tactics before using deadly force.
"Fry didn’t appear to exhaust his options," Davis said, adding that he was able to review enhanced versions of the shooting footage while evaluating the case for IPRA.
"His partner, Officer Toth, had elected to chase Mr. Chatman and try to capture him," Davis said. "What Officer Fry could have done was use a radio to notify other groups [of] the direction of Mr. Chatman's flight and cut him off, or join in the pursuit."
According to the lawsuit filed by Chatman's family, a maximum of seven seconds passed between Chatman jumping out of his vehicle and the police opening fire.
“The officers are told by their union, the Fraternal Order of Police, to make all of those statements,” Davis said. “Consequently, you have hundreds of police shootings where hundreds of officers are saying the same thing. That should destroy their credibility."
"They have to be trained to tell the truth and describe in their own words exactly what occurred," Davis went on, "rather than reading canned comments you always see."
A U.S. magistrate previously sided with the city, agreeing the video should be kept from the public, but lawyers for Chatman's family asked a federal judge in December to overturn the ruling.
The same day the Chatman family was in court fighting pushback from the city, Emanuel was busy apologizing for the city's handling of the McDonald video release and pledging greater transparency and accountability.
On Jan. 7, 2013, Fry and Toth spotted Chatman driving alone in a car that matched the description given to police of a stolen vehicle. Fry and Toth pulled Chatman over and ordered him out of the vehicle, prompting the teen to run.
According to court records, Fry said he fired four shots. Chatman was struck twice. Attorney Brian Coffman, who represents Chatman's family, said that after the teen was on the ground, an officer flipped him over, handcuffed him and pressed his boot into the teen's back. Chatman later died of his injuries.
While the officers involved were cleared of wrongdoing, two of Chatman's friends -- Martel Odom, 23, and Akeem Clarke, 22 -- were later charged with murder for allegedly "setting into motion" a chain of events that led to Chatman's death, according to DNAinfo Chicago. Chatman and his friends were allegedly involved in a carjacking before the shooting, but Odom and Clarke were not in the car when Chatman was stopped. The charges for the two men were later reduced.
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