Chicago mayor confident in city attorneys

The head of a city watchdog that investigates Chicago police shootings pledged greater tr…

A top attorney for the City of Chicago has resigned after a federal judge said he hid evidence in a deadly police shooting case.

The current firestorm around Emanuel stems from the mayor’s efforts to suppress the video of Laquan’s death, which clearly shows a white police officer shooting the teenager 16 times including multiple shots fired after the young man was already on the ground.

In Pinex’s case, the officers who stopped his vehicle testified that they did so because it matched a auto involved in a shooting they had heard about over their police radio.

But records later showed that the officers weren’t listening to a police radio channel at all.

A lawyer or Pinex’s family says Marsh’s conduct speaks to a bigger issues within the city. Chang also imposed sanctions against the city and Marsh, ordering that the attorney’s fees be used to pay the plaintiffs.

After joining Emanuel at an unrelated news conference at a CTA bus garage, U.S. Rep. Danny Davis, D-Ill., predicted that the Law Department would rightfully get swept up into the Justice Department’s investigation.

Marsh’s resignation was announced later in the day with the city maintaining that it doesn’t “tolerate any action that would call into question the integrity of the lawyers who serve Chicago”. It also said it was reviewing its training and evidence-gathering procedures. She said the problem is bigger than a single city lawyer going astray. He accused the department of not acting quickly enough when it realized its attorney wasn’t forthcoming about critical evidence.

In October, the Guardian launched a lawsuit against the City of Chicago that exposed a Chicago police station essentially serving as a secret “interrogation warehouse” where police routinely denied legal representation to the mostly African American detainees. And there was no public telephone listing for a Jordan Marsh in Chicago.

Changes are coming to the agency that acts as a Chicago Police Department watchdog. And I think an appropriate decision will ultimately be made….

In McDonald’s case, IPRA and city officials cited the ongoing investigation in not making the video public for more than a year.

In the wake of the November release of the Laquan McDonald police shooting video, the mayor told aldermen last month that “a code of silence” exists in the Police Department to “cover up” wrongdoing. “There is no statute of limitations on that”, Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel told the Chicago Sun-Times.

Attorneys for Jones’ family filed a wrongful death lawsuit against the city Monday.