But interviews, official city calendars and emails show in both cases the mayor's closest aides and City Hall attorneys knew much earlier than that.
Emanuel's top staffers became keenly aware the McDonald shooting could become a legal and political quagmire in December 2014 — more than three months before the mayor has said he was fully briefed on the issue. And lawyers for McDonald's family informed Emanuel's Law Department in March that police officers' version of what happened differed dramatically from the infamous shooting video — more than eight months before the mayor said he found out about the discrepancy and well after he agreed to settle the case for $5 million.
Those same top staffers met numerous times with Emanuel in the six months between the October 2014 killing of McDonald by now-indicted Officer Jason Van Dyke and the city's settlement with the McDonald family in April, emails and copies of Emanuel's public calendar show. In between those meetings, the records show, the staffers closely assessed the situation behind the scenes, exchanged scores of emails on the topic, kept close tabs on media interest in the shooting and watched for a potential lawsuit to be filed in the case.
The Tribune also found that Emanuel's top lawyer, Corporation Counsel Stephen Patton, was in communication with U.S. Attorney Zachary Fardon, whose office was and is conducting a criminal probe of police conduct in the case. Top police brass who sat in meetings with Emanuel followed developments in the shooting, and Emanuel's then-chief of staff Lisa Schrader reviewed emails and began sitting in on the mayor's police updates as media reports began to surface.
Emanuel and Patton declined to be interviewed for this story. Asked whether the mayor knew or should have known sooner about the circumstances of the shooting and the contradictions between police reports and the video, the Emanuel administration did not directly respond.
"What you're talking about are routine meetings between the mayor and police superintendent on crime reduction strategies, and the mayor and the corporation counsel on a wide range of legal matters," Emanuel spokesman Adam Collins said in an email.
The fallout from the McDonald shooting has posed the most significant challenge in Emanuel's tenure as he tries to dismiss claims he helped keep the video private and stave off calls for his resignation. At the same time, Emanuel has acknowledged the city handled the shooting and its aftermath poorly, eventually welcomed a Justice Department investigation of his Police Department for civil rights violations and last weekend announced he had hired powerhouse Chicago lawyer Dan Webb to conduct a third-party review of the city's Law Department.
Throughout it all, questions have been raised about what Emanuel knew of the shooting, when he knew it and whether steps to correct police misconduct could have been taken sooner. The Tribune review of official city calendars, police reports and more than 3,000 pages of emails — most of which were released on New Year's Eve as part of a massive open-records request — provide the clearest view yet of how Emanuel and his administration handled the case.
Video, police reports conflict
One of the most troubling aspects of the McDonald case has been police reports from the shooting that were vividly in conflict with the dashboard camera video.
On Dec. 4, 2015, the Emanuel administration made public hundreds of pages of police reports that showed Van Dyke and at least five other officers claimed McDonald moved or turned threateningly toward them, even though the video shows McDonald walking away. One officer claimed McDonald advanced and swung his knife at them in an "aggressive, exaggerated manner" before the teen was shot 16 times and killed. Officers also claimed that even after Van Dyke shot McDonald, the teen attempted to get up off the ground with the knife pointed toward the officers and still presented a threat.
Emanuel has said he did not learn of discrepancies between the video and police reports filed on the shooting until those reports became public early last month. That came during a Dec. 8 interview with WTTW-TV in which the mayor was specifically asked when he first learned that the video of the shooting and the initial police reports didn't jibe. "When we get the information — that it's public — that's when I learned it, like everybody else," Emanuel said.
But public documents reviewed by the Tribune, including Patton's calendar, show the Law Department was aware there were allegations of discrepancies as far back as March, more than eight months before the mayor has said he knew.
One week in mid-March is key.
On March 16 — about a month before the City Council approved the settlement with McDonald's family — Patton's official calendar shows he was scheduled to speak with U.S. Attorney Fardon, whose office had started an investigation. Later that same day, Patton was scheduled to attend a "meeting regarding police involved shootings," a gathering at which a mayoral public engagement assistant also was expected to attend. Then, a half-hour later, Patton had a meeting scheduled with lawyers for McDonald's family, according to the calendar and interviews.
By this point, records show those attorneys, Michael Robbins and Jeffrey Neslund, already had raised questions about the handling of the case and were looking to reach a settlement. Two days later, the attorneys read the police reports that contradicted the McDonald shooting video, an observation they noted in a March 23 follow-up letter to Patton's office that outlined their view that the police reports were false and witness statements ignored, a clear flag to the administration of possible wider misconduct.
"We have confirmed that the narrative summaries contained in the police reports of both police and civilian witnesses are false," Robbins wrote. "Civilian witnesses who are alleged to have told the police that they did not see the shooting, have told us they did indeed see the shooting, and that it was unnecessary (which of course, is entirely consistent with the dash cam video). One witness whom the police reports alleged did not see the shooting, in fact told multiple police officers that he saw the shooting, and it was 'like an execution.'
"Civilian witnesses have told us that they were held against their will for hours, intensively questioned by detectives, during which they were repeatedly pressured by police to change their statements," the letter continued. "When the witnesses refused to do so, the investigating officers simply fabricated civilian accounts in the reports."
A day later, the city reached a settlement in principle with the McDonald family, according to records and interviews.
Problem shooting from start
Although McDonald was killed in the fall of 2014, the mayor has said he was not aware how bad the circumstances surrounding the shooting were until late March when Patton briefed him. That was just before Emanuel won re-election in a runoff election versus Cook County Commissioner Jesus "Chuy" Garcia on April 7 and the City Council approved the $5 million settlement April 15.
"Kind of the full extent of everything is when Corporation Counsel Steve Patton had reached kind of an agreement in principle with the family, I think that's around toward the end of March, where he told me the details involved, and I obviously was aghast and horrified," Emanuel said when asked at a Dec. 9, 2015, City Hall news conference about the timing of his knowledge of many of the facts in the case.
But the documents show that from the earliest weeks after the McDonald shooting, many Emanuel staffers were well aware the case could become controversial and kept close tabs on its developments.
Between the shooting and the settlement approval, the mayor himself was scheduled to meet 16 times with former police Superintendent Garry McCarthy, Emanuel's calendars show, including seven one-on-one meetings. While none of the calendar entries list the topics to be discussed, they show superintendent's staff and the mayor's staff were keeping abreast of the McDonald shooting just before or after many of the sit-downs between Emanuel and McCarthy.
Email traffic at City Hall started almost immediately after the shooting, and inquiries about the dash-cam video were made in the first month.
On Oct. 21, 2014, the morning after McDonald was shot, Janey Rountree, Emanuel's deputy chief of staff for public safety who later took a lead on issues surrounding the case, received an email from Chicago Public Schools' chief safety and security office informing her that McDonald, a student at an alternative CPS school, was shot and killed by police.
Three days later, Rountree met with Patton, according to his calendar. The topic of the sit-down was not listed in documents released to the Tribune under an open-records request. Collins, the Emanuel spokesman, said Rountree requested the meeting almost a week before the shooting, and covered unrelated issues.
The first scheduled meeting between Emanuel and McCarthy after the shooting was Oct. 28 at a Chicago Police Department training facility, a gathering that also was to include Rountree and James Roussell, McCarthy's chief of staff. The next day, the Independent Police Review Authority, a body appointed by Emanuel to review cases of possible police misconduct, forwarded the video of McDonald's shooting to the Cook County state's attorney's office, court records show.
As early as Nov. 14, emails show the city's Law Department asked the Police Department for in-car videos from the McDonald shooting in a request that included Thomas Platt, a city lawyer under Patton who would shepherd the case as lawyers for the teen's family began interacting with City Hall.
Then-Superintendent McCarthy's top deputies also monitored the situation surrounding the case, City Hall emails show.
On Nov. 17, 2014, emails show Robert Klimas, the commander of CPD internal affairs, emailed others in the department to ask whether any media outlets had sought documents regarding the McDonald shooting. He was told no, and forwarded that information to Roussell.
Two days later — Nov. 19 — Roussell was scheduled to be in Emanuel's office along with McCarthy and Rountree, the mayor's calendar shows.
Then Nov. 21, Emanuel was scheduled to have a private meeting with Patton. The corporation counsel's calendar shows he was expected to meet the mayor for lunch and a legal update, using the coding "MyChiExec."
Emanuel spokesman Collins said that Patton's office that fall "was managing a wide range of major issues facing the city from a pension lawsuit to the retiree health care case and beyond."
Emanuel chief of staff Schrader was among those in the administration following the progression of the McDonald case as media and lawyers were asking for the video two months after McDonald's death.
The earliest publicly released document that indicates Emanuel's top aides were aware of the shooting video is dated Dec. 8, 2014. Patton emailed Schrader with the subject line "FW: Video of Chicago police shooting; ATTORNEY CLIENT PRIVILEGED AND CONFIDENTIAL," telling the top mayoral staffer he had just left her a voice mail on the topic.
The next morning, Patton emailed Schrader, Rountree, Emanuel spokeswoman Kelley Quinn, and Emanuel senior adviser David Spielfogel. In the email, Patton said he asked city lawyers to be on the lookout for a lawsuit in the McDonald case and "to notify us immediately if and when a complaint is filed." By the end of the day, Schrader had forwarded around a copy of a Crain's story quoting advocates calling for the release of the McDonald video.
The next publicly released document related to the case is dated Jan. 20. Patton forwarded to Schrader and others an email from Platt, the city attorney who handled the McDonald case, regarding the shooting. But the Emanuel administration redacted the full content of Platt's message.
The next month, Schrader, Rountree, Patton and others were copied on a Feb. 10 email from a city spokesman that included a write-up from the website Slate that challenged the account given by police based on the autopsy performed on McDonald.
From that day in mid-February until April, when the city settled the case, the mayor's calendar shows Schrader was scheduled to attend all of Emanuel's Chicago Police Department update meetings with McCarthy and his top brass. The first of those took place about a week after the Slate email, on Feb. 18. Collins said Schrader was the senior staffer at the meetings because Spielfogel had left the government side. Spielfogel was working on Emanuel's re-election campaign.
Schrader helped shape the city's messaging on the McDonald case. On Feb. 23, five days after that first police meeting, she reviewed a police response to an inquiry from a Chicago Sun-Times columnist in which the department declined to give details pending an investigation of the case.
"I'm good here," Schrader wrote on the email chain after reviewing the proposed response. Schrader, who no longer works for the city, did not return calls seeking comment.
Schrader was listed as an optional attendee on the mayor's calendar when Emanuel was scheduled to take an update briefing from Patton on April 9, just before Patton presented the settlement to the City Council's finance committee and the full council voted to settle the matter.
Now, as Emanuel continues to deal with the fallout from the McDonald shooting, McCarthy remains the highest-ranking staffer to become a political casualty.
McCarthy's tenure as police superintendent included routine updates with the mayor, but the number and frequency picked up prior to the settlement with McDonald's family. Emanuel's calendars show he had four meetings that included McCarthy in February 2015, while in June, when the department would be gearing up for typical summer violence surges, the mayor's calendar shows only one.
Emanuel has denied that McCarthy briefed him on the discrepancies between the video of the shooting and reports filed by officers on the scene that night.
"No, that's not what he briefed me about or anything like that," the mayor said last month on WTTW.
The shooting video wasn't released until a Cook County judge's order forced it into the spotlight last fall. And Emanuel took no steps against his Police Department until late last year, despite the reports from officers at the scene that clearly contradict the video.
McCarthy, who did not return calls seeking comment, was fired Dec. 1, 2015. Emanuel said his top cop had become "a distraction."
Original Article
Source: chicagotribune.com/
Author: Jeff Coen and John Chase
No comments:
Post a Comment