There’s a lot going on in the videos that captured a police-involved shooting that took place yesterday in Chicago. According to the local NBC station, the altercation took place yesterday at about 4:00 p.m. at a downtown Chicago Transit Authority station.
In the first video below that shows the beginning of the sequence, you can hear both officers fire their TASERs to try to bring the suspect down. The second video shows the female CPD officer later use mace after struggling to subdue him.
When that failed and the suspect managed to struggled free, the female officer drew her firearm and shot him.
Here’s are the NSFW videos, which might be disturbing to some viewers:
This is the two minutes leading up to the previous video. (Twitter won’t let me upload it all at once.) pic.twitter.com/rkWrIfSkpE
— The Unaffiliated Critic (@FreeRangeCritic) February 28, 2020
The Chicago Sun-Times reports that the two officers tried to arrest the suspect after he was seen “jumping from train to train.”
The suspect appears to be unarmed. Note that the male officer, who had repeatedly shouted “Shoot him!” was directly behind the suspect when the female officer fired the first round. She apparently shot the suspect again as he reached the top of the escalator and she was a few steps behind him.
The suspect is reported to have undergone surgery and is in critical but stable condition.
Again from the Sun-Times:
Two officers were taken off the street pending an investigation of the encounter, part of which was captured on video that Mayor Lori Lightfoot called “extremely disturbing” and which police officials suggested could be part of a criminal probe.
It all happened just hours after interim Chicago Police Supt. Charlie Beck joined Lightfoot and CTA president Dorval Carter to announce a new security plan for the mass transit system, which has seen a rash of shootings in recent weeks.
Lightfoot said in a Friday evening tweet that “with the strong caveat that one perspective does not depict the entirety of the incident, the video is extremely disturbing and the actions by these officers are deeply concerning.”
As the Associated Press reports,
The shooting came on the same day that the department and the mayor announced that in response to a spike in crime on the city’s rail system, dozens more officers would be assigned to CTA trains and platforms, a team of detectives would investigate nothing but CTA crimes and a Strategic Decision Support Center would be opened so that police can monitor the system’s 32,000 cameras.