Above Photo: Family spokesman and activist Ja’Mal Green, attorney Michael Oppenheimer and Briana Adams, sister of Paul O’Neal, spoke to the news media Aug. 5, 2016, after viewing footage of the July 28 police shooting death of 18-year-old O’Neal. Protesters gathered at Chicago police headquarters later in the day.
Chicago officials have declined to identify the police officers involved in the fatal shooting of Paul O’Neal, citing in part alleged dangers faced by the officers if their names became public.
The Independent Police Review Authority declined to give the officers’ names in response to a Freedom of Information Act request by the Tribune, releasing a document Tuesday with the officers’ names blacked out. The agency cited, among other parts of state records law, a clause that allows an agency to withhold information if disclosure would “endanger the life or physical safety of law enforcement personnel or any other person.”
On Friday, acting with unusual swiftness, IPRA released nine video clips from police dashboard and body cameras that showed apparent procedural errors by three officers who opened fire at O’Neal, 18, as he fled July 28 in a reportedly stolen Jaguar and then on foot. Police Superintendent Eddie Johnson moved quickly to strip the three of their powers, citing potential policy violations.
The Police Department has also declined to name the officers, citing a union contract clause that prevents identifying officers who have pending disciplinary matters but haven’t been criminally charged. The department has yet to fulfill an open-records request from the Tribune for reports from the case.
IPRA’s response to the records request cited no specific threat to police, and a department spokeswoman declined to comment further.
But a flash message to officers obtained by the Tribune said that several gangs had held a meeting last week to discuss hurting police. The alert warned police that the gangs had considered using automatic weapons and a sniper against officers.
Chicago police spokesman Anthony Guglielmi on Tuesday declined to give further details on the basis for the alert, though he said there was “some specificity” to the threat. He added that these types of alerts are somewhat common.
“Frankly, we get these things fairly regularly,” Guglielmi said.
Guglielmi also noted that Chicago police have been in a “heightened posture” since the fatal shootings of five Dallas police officers last month. Since then, Chicago police officers have been told to work in pairs, for example.
Identifying police in fatal shootings can be a contentious issue between police unions and city administrations. Practices for going public with officers’ identities vary nationwide, with departments releasing names within one or two days in some high-profile cases and holding them back in others. In one recent police shooting that garnered national attention — the killing of Philando Castile in Minnesota in July — officials released the identity of the officer who fired about 24 hours after the shooting.
O’Neal’s shooting marks an early test of Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s pledge to reform policing and oversight, and transparency has been central to his announcements about his plans. While the city moved quickly to publicly release the videos and pull the officers off the streets, the videos document apparent tactical errors of the kind that have long troubled the department.
The videos show the chaos that ensued after O’Neal, driving the allegedly stolen vehicle, clipped either a police SUV, a parked car or both in the South Shore neighborhood. Officers fired about 15 shots at the fleeing sports car before it barreled into a police SUV down the block, the videos showed. Other officers appeared to be directly in the line of fire when police shot at the fleeing vehicle.
Departmental policy specifically bans shooting at a car when it is the lone threat to an officer or others.
After O’Neal ran from the Jaguar, police chased him into a backyard, firing about five more shots, the clips show. O’Neal, who was unarmed, died of a gunshot wound to the back, authorities said.
While the body camera of the officer who fired at O’Neal in the yard was not recording as he fired the shots, it was turned on after the shooting, and it has yet to be explained how that happened. The cameras nonetheless captured potentially damning comments by at least one of the officers after the shooting.
The officer who is believed to have fired the fatal shot in the backyard said he thought O’Neal might have been shooting at him from the moving Jaguar, when in fact his colleagues had been firing on the car. The videos show that officer also said that when he opened fire on O’Neal, “I didn’t know if he was armed or not.”
A previous version of this story misquoted the police officer who shot Paul O’Neal, implying he thought O’Neal fired at him in a South Shore yard. The original quote was “When he came out the yard, he shot at me.” But a further review of video shows that, in fact, the officer said, “When he came out the (inaudible), I shot at him.” The Tribune regrets the error.