In the wake of our series detailing the lack of oversight that has followed suburban police shootings, the General Assembly passed a bill that would require all police departments to perform procedural reviews after police shootings.
Advocates say that the bill doesn’t go far enough, ensuring smooth passage through Springfield.
Nevertheless, Illinois Attorney General Democratic candidate Kwame Raoul called the series’ findings “outrageous.”
As the story noted, Chicago has its own bureaucracy to conduct policy reviews in police shootings. Suburban police chiefs argued they lack the resources in cash-strapped towns to assign officers to do policy reviews.
One example detailed in the BGA/WBEZ reports happened in south suburban Glenwood, where a retiree was shot and killed by a sniper’s bullet following an eight-hour standoff with police in which he pleaded 32 times for the SWAT team surrounding his house to leave.
“When you are in a little place like Glenwood, did anyone care, did anyone hear about it, did we know?” said State Sen. Toi Hutchinson (D-Olympia Fields). “All the oxygen gets sucked out of the room to the level of information that gets disseminated whenever anything happens in the city of Chicago.”