First published on Mon 3 May 2021 06.00 EDT
On 20 May 2019, the freshly elected Chicago mayor Lori Lightfoot delivered her inauguration speech to a jubilant audience.
It was imbued with promises of fundamental change â tailored care for blighted neighborhoods, solutions to government corruption and endemic violent crime, an ambitious agenda for tackling deep-rooted faults in the city.
âFor years theyâve said Chicago ainât ready for reform. Well, get ready, because reform is here,â Lightfoot, Chicagoâs first Black woman and openly gay mayor, and a former federal prosecutor, said.
She pledged to reform the Chicago police department, promising to âcontinue the hard but essential work of forging partnerships between police officers and the community premised on mutual respect, accountability and a recognition that the destinies of police and community are inextricably intertwinedâ.
Advancing Racial Equality & Social Justice
Police reform and homeland security: Some policy recommendations to close the racial justice gap
By Engy Abdelkader
Image from Shutterstock.com.
Last summer, in response to the killing of George Floyd and other victims of police brutality and amid a public health crisis and economic collapse, Americans saw an overdue reckoning with racial injustice. Around the country, large swaths of peaceful multigenerational, multiracial demonstrators marched to demand social justice and racial equity.
In 2013, the Black Lives Matter social movement was founded to avenge the killing of Trayvon Martin, a Black teenager shot by George Zimmerman, who claimed he mistook a bag of Skittles that Martin was holding for a weapon. The movement sought to bring to light the deaths of Martin and so many other innocent victims whose lives were unjustly taken, despite no subsequent legal accountability.
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Most officers get training to respond to injuries, but are often not required to use it. Fatinha Ramos for The Marshall Project
On September 7, 2013, an off-duty Chicago police officer named Kenneth Walker was working security at a public housing project when he got into a scuffle with a visitor and shot him. “He’s bleeding from the chest, it’s probably critical,” Walker told a 911 dispatcher.
This article was produced in partnership with Type Investigations.
The operator told Walker to cover the wound and keep the man calm. But Walker made no move to help him, security video shows, even as blood began to pool on the sidewalk. Neither did any of the officers who soon arrived on the scene. Instead they stood over Marlon Horton as he gasped for air.