Prosecutors in Chicago will not file criminal charges against a police officer who shot and killed a black man last year, an incident that occurred a week before a different fatal shooting that brought national scrutiny to Chicago’s police force, officials said Monday.
Anita Alvarez, the state’s attorney for Cook County, announced the decision. She held a lengthy news conference Monday to go over details of the investigation and what police and witnesses said. She played a dashboard camera video that captured a portion of the incident.
George Hernandez, a Chicago police officer, shot and killed Ronald Johnson III in October 2014, the week before a different officer shot and killed Laquan McDonald, a black 17-year-old. The fatal shooting of McDonald was captured in a graphic dashboard camera video that was released last month, drawing attention to Chicago at a time of an intense national focus on how police officers use deadly force.
Alvarez said “all of the evidence points to the fact” that Johnson had a gun when he was shot, including accounts from other people in the car with him the night he was killed.
Attorneys for Johnson’s family have accused the city and the police force of covering up what happened, insisting that Johnson was unarmed when he was shot.
Earlier Monday, the Justice Department said it was launching a broad investigation into the Chicago Police Department to look at the way officers use force. That federal probe followed protests and unrest in Chicago over the way authorities handled the shooting of McDonald, a teenager who was holding a knife when an officer fired more than a dozen shots at him last year.
