What ever happened to Garry McCarthy?

The Chicago police superintendent when a cop killed Laquan McDonald and the city covered it up.

My drawings and paintings are on Instagram @klonskyart.

On October 20, 2014 Laquan McDonald was murdered. CPD officer Jason Van Dyke fired 16 bullets into his body.

For a year the video was suppressed.

But when the truth finally came to light, Mayor Rahm Emanuel announced he would not run again leading to the election of Lori Lightfoot. States Attorney Anita Alvarez was defeated for re-election by Kim Foxx.

And Police Superintendent Garry McCarthy was fired.

Jason Van Dyke was charged with 2nd degree murder, sentenced to six years and served less than three before he was released.

McCarthy decided to run for Chicago mayor.

He came in 10th with 2.7% of the vote.

I hadn’t given much thought to Garry McCarthy until a Park Ridge teacher friend messaged me.

Fred, thought you might like to know that Gerry McCarthy, former CPD Supt, now lives in Park Ridge. He weighed in on SROs not having the ability to discipline in schools during the July Board meeting.

When McCarthy was Chicago’s top cop he was a proponent of the “broken windows” strategy of policing, which he had learned from his old boss, New York Police Commissioner William Bratton: cracking down on minor crimes, such as gambling and public urination.

Black and Brown communities were mainly targeted.

In New York this approach led to the cop killing of Eric Garner for selling loosies.

In Chicago it led to 16 bullets in the body of Laquan McDonald.

My old school district’s board of ed has been considering using limited school resources to hire police officers and placing them in the community’s schools.

Former Chicago Police Chief Garry McCarthy, now a Park Ridge resident, recently attended a board meeting and spoke to the board in support of the idea of placing school resource officers in Emerson and Lincoln Middle Schools. He cited mass shootings at schools as the main reason for his position.

McCarthy, who recently took the top spot at the Willow Springs Police Department and works as a law enforcement consultant, argued that school resource officers would be another line of defense against possible violence.

“Criminals are like water and electricity,” he said. “They take the path of least resistance in any plan for security.”

I’m thinking: The Uvalde Texas schools had cops on duty.

But one parent told the board she felt that “SROs have been introduced as a solution to a problem that has yet to be identified.”

“Is there something going on in our middle schools that we’re just not aware of as a community that really needs to be addressed?” she asked.

Good question.

At the July 21st meeting, some board members suggested the cost for cops as School Resource Offers as being from $75,000 to $100,000 per school per year..

Parents at the board meeting said the idea of placing police officers in the district’s middle schools was a bad one, saying research and federal guidance don’t support the idea that school resource officers create safer schools.