By Annie Sweeney and Jeremy Gorner
Chicago Tribune
CHICAGO — A definitive statement from the Chicago Police Department about an officer’s fatal shooting of two people — one by accident — came Saturday night, 16 hours after the incident.
But when it did arrive, the comments from interim Superintendent John Escalante were notable. In the late-evening press release, Escalante not only announced a major policy shift on returning officers to duty after a shooting, he also took the unusual step to acknowledge that an innocent victim had been hit by an errant police bullet.
“The 55-year-old female victim was accidentally struck and tragically killed,” the statement read. “The department extends its deepest condolences to the victim’s family and friends.”
In contrast, the 2012 department statement on the fatal shooting of 22-year-old Rekia Boyd, who was also an unintended target of a police shooting, simply noted that a female had “sustained a gunshot wound.”
Both the policy announcement and Escalante’s condolences reflect the emerging reality for the Chicago Police Department in the wake of last month’s release of video of a white police officer fatally shooting an African-American teen. The disturbing 2014 dash-cam video showed 17-year-old Laquan McDonald carrying a pocket knife and walking away from Officer Jason Van Dyke, who shot 16 rounds at the teen within seconds of arriving at the scene and now faces first-degree murder charges.
The video, which was released only after a judge’s order, has led to swift — even dizzying — changes. The U.S. Justice Department has launched a civil rights investigation into excessive force. Police Superintendent Garry McCarthy was fired, and the head of the independent agency that investigates allegations of police misconduct was forced out. Mayor Rahm Emanuel publicly apologized.
The shooting about 4:30 a.m. Saturday in the 4700 block of West Erie Street was the department’s first lethal use of force since the McDonald video was released, providing a glimpse of how it is responding to the biggest crisis of Emanuel’s tenure in office.
Department spokesman Anthony Guglielmi said Sunday that Escalante and his command staff had started working on the policy change a week and a half ago. But in the wake of learning details from the West Side shooting, Escalante insisted the statement acknowledge the accidental killing of Bettie Jones, Guglielmi said.
“It was a tragic loss of life. The superintendent was adamant that the department express our deepest condolences,” Guglielmi said. "... The climate we are in is causing us to look at this. We are really trying to make the department better.”
In the Saturday shooting on Erie, Harrison District officers were responding to a domestic violence call of a man wielding a bat.
Police shot and killed Quintonio LeGrier, a 19-year-old engineering student, after he became combative with them, the Chicago police statement said. During the altercation, Bettie Jones, 55, a mother of five who lived downstairs from LeGrier’s father, was shot and killed by accident.
Hours after the West Side incident, Chicago police were involved in yet another shooting, though this one nonfatal. At 1:30 p.m. in the 1000 block of West 103rd Place, officers confronted a man with a gun, leading one officer to open fire, wounding the man.
Such confrontations with the public are the focus of the Justice Department civil rights investigation, which was announced earlier this month by U.S. Attorney General Loretta Lynch.
The probe will include a detailed examination of how and when officers use force in the department, as well as how the city investigates the incidents.
The investigation was prompted by the McDonald shooting but comes after years of civil lawsuits against the department and outcries from the public over police-involved shootings.
The review is expected to be lengthy, taking at least a year, and will likely lead to a court-enforced consent decree demanding systemic reforms. Recommended changes could cover anything from training to how firearm discharges are recorded and documented in the department.
But Chicago doesn’t have to wait for the Justice Department review to address problems, and Escalante has already made some moves aimed at restoring public confidence.
Soon after Escalante took over as interim superintendent, he announced a policy change on dashboard cameras. Because there was missing audio in the dashboard cameras from responding vehicles the night of McDonald’s shooting, Escalante has sent out inspectors on random checks to see if the dash cams are working property. If an inspector finds that an officer didn’t tell a supervisor about a faulty camera, that officer could be disciplined.
Then on Saturday night, the interim superintendent announced another policy change: Officers involved in shootings will be shifted to mandatory administrative duty, returning to their assigned bureau for desk duty for 30 days. The new policy includes the officer or officers involved in Saturday’s shooting, according to the police statement.
That is a big shift from the current policy in which officers generally had three days to see a counselor and be cleared for return to duty unless it was determined that they need more time off. Officers were also required to report for a one-day retraining at the academy — though that could happen after they returned to duty.
During the newly established 30-day period, the officer will be required to attend the training class at the academy, commanding officers will monitor and evaluate if the officer is prepared to return to street duties, and the officer will have to see a department counselor.
Guglielmi said Escalante reviewed other cities’ departments and settled on the 30 days because “it seemed like a fair amount of time to get all those objectives done.”
Providing officers with time off following a shooting is not unusual. It is considered essential to making sure an officer is coping with any psychological issues in the aftermath of the incident and is getting whatever support he or she needs. Getting the proper help for officers is not an easy task in a profession where admitting weakness has historically been frowned upon.
During the time off, however long, the critical task is that the officer get competent counseling and that the department is able to determine if training issues need to be addressed, policing experts said.
“It could be anger management. It could be that officer has forgotten how to maintain their presence on the street,” said Samuel Walker, professor emeritus at the University of Nebraska at Omaha and expert on police accountability. "… There are tactical mistakes that officers make that can be corrected with immediate retraining.”
Walker and other experts say there is no standard time that departments use, but he wondered why Chicago’s department did not tailor the time to the individual officer’s needs.
“The length needs to be tailored to the circumstance. And the seriousness,” he said.
Under New York Police Department guidelines, officers involved in shootings are automatically reassigned to administrative duties for a minimum of three consecutive days.
In Los Angeles, officers also are required to see a department psychologist after being involved in a shooting, and they are automatically shifted to administrative duty. Within three to five days, the chief of police meets with a specialized unit that reviews shootings to decide if the officer is fit to return to duty, said LAPD Detective Meghan Aguilar, a department spokeswoman.
That meeting could also result in a recommendation that the officer get additional training before returning. There is no fixed number of days to be on desk duty, Aguilar said.
Chicago’s new 30-day requirement caught the head of the Fraternal Order of Police off guard.
“We are surprised,” said Dean Angelo, FOP president. “We haven’t been involved. There is an awful lot going on now with the DOJ here, with the world media attention on Chicago, and I think there are some very reactionary decisions going on.”
Guglielmi said the department reached out to Angelo last week and planned to have a more detailed meeting with him after the holidays. But the shootings Saturday led Escalante to “accelerate the process.”
In the wake of the McDonald shooting, there have been steady protests calling for defunding of the Police Department, not to mention demands for the resignation of Emanuel and Cook County State’s Attorney Anita Alvarez, who has been criticized for not moving fast enough to charge Van Dyke.
But even before the McDonald video release, activists and organizers had been regularly attending the Chicago Police Board meetings expressing concerns about the department and the number of shootings.
The fatal shooting of Boyd, an unintended target of an off-duty officer’s shooting in 2012, was a key rallying point.
That Escalante responded so quickly to Jones’ death is a “significant gesture,” said the Rev. Jesse Jackson, the longtime civil rights leader who heads the Rainbow/PUSH Coalition.
But Jackson said the department still has a long way to go toward building community trust.
“This shooting is a result of excessive force, and Bettie Jones should not be seen as collateral damage,” Jackson said. “This is a pattern and practice we’re looking at. … I’m not sure administrative leave is the answer.”
Copyright 2015 the Chicago Tribune