On top of Laquan McDonald and Ronald Johnson, Chicago police have yet another video of a police shooting they don’t want the public to see: The killing of 17-year-old Cedrick Chatman, who was shot in the back while running away from police at full speed, unarmed.
Today a federal judge did the police a favor by ruling that the video of Chatman’s shooting would not be released to the public.
What’s worse is that the head of the Independent Police Review Authority was fired for finding that the shooting was unjustified and following his ouster, that ruling was reversed.
Cedrick LaMont Chatman died just feet from the bus stop where his mother caught the bus to work every day. The city's Independent Police Review Authority, which investigates all police-involved shootings, concluded the shooting was justified.
But Lorenzo Davis, the original IPRA supervising investigator on the case, came to the opposite conclusion and says he was fired in July when he refused to change his report.
The video "shows a shooting that should not have occurred," Davis says. "In my point of view, if you do not have to kill a person, then why would you?"
Watch the video from CNN.
In the police account of the shooting, Chatman ditched a stolen car and ran from two officers. As the officers pursued on foot, the 5-foot-7, 133-pound Chatman turned toward them. Officer Kevin Fry told investigators he feared for his partner's life and fired four shots.
Fry said he believed Chatman was armed.
It turned out he was carrying a box containing an iPhone.
"The video supports Officer Fry's observation that (Chatman) was pointing a firearm at Officer Toth," the final IPRA report said, adding that the "use of deadly force was in compliance with Chicago Police Department policy."
Davis said the videos provide a much different account from the police version of the shooting: Chatman was running for his life and never turned toward the officers.
According to IPRA records, Chicago police have killed more 400 citizens since 2007. There was a significant uptick in shootings starting in 2008, climbing to an average of 30 to 50 per year.
Simultaneous to this, the murder clearance rate for Chicago Police Department is only 25 percent—a 21-year low.
CHICAGO — In 2012, the body count — 506 murders — marked Chicago as America’s murder capital.
But here’s another grim statistic: Chicago police solved just 129 of those killings last year, a 25 percent clearance rate — the lowest in 21 years.
And even when police clear murder cases, that doesn’t mean someone always gets charged with murder.
And as for Chatman’s death at the hands of police?
A Federal judge said Wednesday he would not order the release of videos that captured a Chicago police officer fatally shooting 17-year-old Cedrick Chatman as he fled officers in the South Shore neighborhood in January 2013.
U.S. District Judge Robert Gettleman cited a protective order in an ongoing civil rights lawsuit by Chatman's mother as the reason why the videos can't be made public at this point.
So as a result, the public will not get to see what police did to Cedric Chatman in the name of “public safety.”