Chicago’s battle over police accountability
This article was originally published in The Progressive.
Myles Frazier was in the midst of a mental health crisis when the Chicago Police Department’s SWAT team fatally shot him after a half-hour standoff on May 22.
Police say the twenty-two-year-old black man, who suffered from bipolar disorder, was armed and fired shots outside the building where he had barricaded himself on the city’s predominantly black South Side.
The next day, May 23, two armed people were holed up in an apartment building on the predominantly white Northwest Side. Calls to police progressed from “a man waving a gun around” to “shots fired.” The SWAT team was brought in, and after four hours, a man and a woman were arrested and charged with misdemeanor assault.
“In Chicago, black people are fourteen times more likely to experience [Chicago Police Department] use of force than white people,” said Aislinn Pulley, co-executive director of Chicago Torture Justice Center, at a June 13 press conference called by a coalition of police accountability groups, some of which were plaintiffs in a lawsuit against the city. “We have a crisis with policing.”
To be sure, this crisis existed before police fired sixteen shots into the body of black seventeen-year-old Laquan McDonald in 2014. Police commander Jon…
