At a meeting of the Chicago Police Department’s top cops on about Nov. 1, 2015, a video was played showing an officer firing 16 bullets into the body of a black teenager, Laquan McDonald.
“Everyone in the meeting agreed the shooting was justified,” according to a report, released Wednesday, by the city’s inspector general, Joe Ferguson.
Nobody saw, or dared to say, the honest truth: The shooting was an outrage.
Among those in the room that day was Police Supt. Eddie Johnson, who at the time was a deputy chief. Johnson was among those, if Ferguson’s report is accurate, who saw no evil.
For 3 1⁄2 years now, Johnson has been a strong police superintendent. He has lead efforts to reform the practices and culture of the police department in the wake of the McDonald shooting, and during his tenure the city has seen a steady decline in violent crime.
There’s a good case to be made, as we did in an editorial in April, that Mayor Lori Lightfoot should permanently retain Johnson, who was appointed superintendent by Mayor Rahm Emanuel.
But there’s no getting around Johnson’s silence, acquiescence or approval in that room on that day in November 2015. There is no denying it is a stain on his reputation, as a number of African American aldermen said on Thursday, and the mayor will have to weigh the damage done.
As. Ald. Jeanette Taylor (20th) told Fran Spielman of the Sun-Times: “This is another way that our communities feel like we can’t trust the people who are supposed to protect us.”
In defense of Johnson, Police Department spokesman Anthony Guglielmi said in an email to Spielman, it was not Johnson’s place to say more at the 2015 meeting.
“At the time, Supt. Johnson was Deputy Chief of Area Central and not in any position to comment or object on the incident,” Guglielmi wrote.
We can’t agree with that. We’d like to think that any high-ranking officer worth his salt would have seen something horribly wrong and spoken up when viewing the McDonald video. Being a leader requires that ability and willingness.
The mayor will have to weigh it all, knowing that community trust is the basis of good policing, but also knowing that the measure of Johnson’s professionalism should not be reduced to what he did or didn’t say at one meeting in November 2015.
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