Mayor Rahm Emanuel on Tuesday announced he has dismissed Chicago police Superintendent Garry McCarthy, citing a lack of public trust in the police leadership in the wake of the high-profile shooting that eventually led to a white officer being charged with first-degree murder in the death of a black teen shot 16 times in a Southwest Side street last year.
"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 City Hall news conference where he appointed a task force to look at police accountability.
Emanuel said he and McCarthy on Sunday began discussing the future of the Police Department and "the undeniable fact that the public trust in the leadership of the department has been shaken and eroded."
"This morning, I formally asked for his resignation," said Emanuel, who said McCarthy can be proud of his record. "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 he asked new First Deputy Superintendent John Escalante to serve as acting superintendent during a "thorough" search.
"This is not the end of the problem, but it is the beginning to the solution of the problem," Emanuel said of Tuesday's moves. "There are systematic challenges that will require sustained reforms. It is a work in progress as we continue to build the confidence and the trust by the public in our police force."
McCarthy was not at the news conference, and so far has not responded to voice mails or text messages seeking comment. As late as 8 a.m. Tuesday, he 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.
The mayor, however, is changing course after his office issued statements of support for McCarthy during the past week.
For 4 1/2 years, Emanuel had stood by McCarthy through various 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. Then came the intense criticism of how the two handled the police shooting of 17-year-old McDonald. After Cook County prosecutors charged Officer Jason Van Dyke with first-degree murder a week ago, federal prosecutors disclosed that their probe of the fatal shooting remains "active and ongoing."
Van Dyke shot McDonald along a stretch of Pulaski Road near 41st Street in October 2014. For much of the past year, Emanuel and his lawyers fought in court to keep a police dash-camera video of the shooting under wraps, arguing that releasing it publicly could interfere with state's attorney and federal investigations into the shooting.
But when a Cook County judge's ruling forced Emanuel to release the video to the public last week, the fallout for McCarthy and Emanuel was sharp and immediate. Protesters took 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.
The more-than-weeklong protests and public backlash — in Chicago and across the country — contributed to McCarthy's ouster.
With it comes the departure of Emanuel's only police superintendent since he took office in May 2011. McCarthy's tour atop the department was longer than typical for the pressure-cooker job of running one of the nation's largest, and most controversial, police departments.
On Tuesday afternoon, Illinois Attorney General Lisa Madigan said she wrote to U.S. Attorney General Loretta Lynch asking the federal Justice Department to conduct a civil rights investigation into the Police Department's "use of force, including deadly force; the adequacy of its review and investigation of officers' use of force and investigation of allegations of misconduct; its provision of training, equipment and supervision of officers to allow them to do their job safely and effectively; and whether there exists a pattern or practice of discriminatory policing."
"I write to you with urgency," Madigan writes in the letter to Lynch. "Trust in the Chicago Police Department is broken, especially in communities of color in the City of Chicago."
The U.S. attorney's office in Chicago already is conducting a probe into the McDonald shooting that it announced in April.
At City Hall, Ald. Patrick O'Connor, 40th, the mayor's City Council floor leader, said he believed McCarthy in no way supported or condoned improper police conduct but nevertheless had become an impediment to Emanuel's effort to address the issue of police misconduct.
"Somebody had to be accountable overall, and I think unfortunately it was becoming clear that the discussion on what to do with the department and how to resolve these long-term community-related issues — we weren't able to have those conversations under the current circumstance.
"When the people that you are trying to work with have basically taken the attitude that they will not work with the current power structure, you can dig your heels in, or you can try and move forward towards a solution," O'Connor said. "And that's, I think, where the mayor has gone. He's trying to move forward towards a solution."
O'Connor also said Emanuel had difficult shoals to navigate. On one hand, he can't alienate honest, hardworking cops. On the other, he has "to find a way to try and show that they are doing more than the current system, which is basically to react to the next complaint."
Many African-American aldermen have been calling for McCarthy to be replaced for months or years because of stubbornly high violent crime rates in their wards and in some cases their that belief he wasn't taking their concerns seriously. Most of the 18 members of the City Council Black Caucus held a news conference in October calling for his ouster, and members renewed that demand after the McDonald video was released.
Minutes after Emanuel announced that he had asked for McCarthy's resignation, mayoral ally Ald. Michelle Harris, 8th, called the McDonald shooting investigation "the tip of the iceberg" in terms of the City Council Black Caucus' feelings about McCarthy. "The trust in McCarthy probably was gone before this," she said.
And Ald. Walter Burnett Jr., 27th, also a backer of Emanuel's agenda, said the simmering distrust of McCarthy built in its intensity after the video's release.
"You could feel the momentum coming from all over the city," Burnett said. "I know it appears it was just an African-American thing, but it was more than that. Those sentiments were shared with people all over Chicago, from every nationality. As a matter of fact, I went to my Korean cleaner's. He was upset about this situation."
Ald. Jason Ervin, 28th, has long criticized McCarthy for failing to address "quality of life" complaints from residents of his West Side ward. He welcomed McCarthy's ouster but said it won't mean much if Emanuel doesn't demand serious changes in the way the department interacts with the community.
"This is the first step of many that need to be taken," Ervin said. "While I'm glad (McCarthy) has been relieved of his duties, we need to see a commitment to actually doing community policing. You can't just talk about it."
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.
But the McDonald shooting exposed a perceived weakness — that Emanuel and McCarthy had not done enough to institute meaningful reforms in a department long known for a culture of corruption, torture, wrongful convictions and lax discipline.
As the mayor and McCarthy both prepared for the fallout of hundreds of thousands of people watching the video of Van Dyke repeatedly shooting McDonald, both sought to portray the incident as the case of a bad apple that did not reflect more systemic problems in the department.
But for many Chicagoans, the story of McDonald's death held an all-too-familiar set of circumstances: City Hall initially casts the incident as an act of police self-defense, only for the facts to bear out a different story later.
Immediately after the shooting on Oct. 20, 2014, a Chicago police union spokesman said that McDonald had lunged at officers before he was killed. And in an official statement the next day, Chicago police said McDonald "refused to comply with orders to drop the knife and continued to approach the officers." The video, however, showed McDonald walking down the street, away from officers as Van Dyke opened fire.
With that video airing on newscasts across the country and online around the world, McCarthy and Emanuel's one-bad-apple narrative of Van Dyke's actions 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.
It took Emanuel more than a week after Van Dyke was charged with murder to publicly address the notion of change, appointing a task force to make recommendations to improve police accountability. It was the type of announcement many politicians make when faced with a crisis to buy time and create breathing room.
But it wasn't enough to spare McCarthy from losing his job, one that made him a household name in Chicago.
McCarthy's familiar New York accent, flattop haircut and thick mustache quickly made him well-known in the city, particularly after he spearheaded City Hall's response to the 2012 NATO summit that brought scores of international leaders, and days of large-scale protests, to Chicago.
As protesters had violent clashes with police in the streets, McCarthy could be seen standing behind his line of officers in his white shirt and blue cap, running the show as protests unfolded. At the time, McCarthy had struggled with criticism from within the department that he had brought an arrogant, New York-knows-best attitude and was too cozy with Emanuel, but his decision to be visible on the ground helped his standing with the rank and file.
"It's where I'm supposed to be," McCarthy said at the time. "And I have great reverence for officers. I interact with them very easily. You can't fake it. You either are or you aren't. I'm very comfortable in that role."
Chicago Tribune's Jeremy Gorner contributed.
Spread the word