Last week, Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel called a meeting with black religious leaders from the South Side at City Hall. Emanuel was preparing to release a dashcam video of the police killing of Laquan McDonald, a 17-year-old who had previously been failed by the system after the Illinois Department of Children and Family Services twice placed him into foster homes where he was sexually molested, and then failed to follow up on reports of abuse. Later, after spending a year trying to cover up what amounted to a public execution of a child, Emanuel eventually forced Police Superintendent Garry McCarthy to take the fall for it.

According to a report in Chicago political newsletter Aldertrack about the meeting, Emanuel made an effort to get ahead of what he must have known to be damning footage. After noting that he'd only slept two hours the night before, he described the video, despite his repeated claims throughout the meeting that he had not seen it. Radio host Carl West, who was present at the meeting, told Aldertrack of Emanuel

“You signed off on a $5 million check to an orphan. You don’t tell me you don’t see the tape. That doesn’t compute for me.” 

Emanuel then encouraged the religious leaders to protest the Chicago police (who have shot and killed more citizens than any other American force over the last five years) within their communities, but stressed that these demonstrations should be peaceful. Like former New York cop and professional CNN dog whistle-blower Harry Houck, Emanuel seemed to believe that Chicago's famously well-organized activist communities would be overcome by rioters. (But even if they were, worse things could happen.)

He was so concerned about this potential for riots that he threatened to use his mayoral power to withhold city resources from South Side communities if they did occur (which, to be clear, they did not). “He said, if things go bad then don’t come looking to me for jobs,” Rev. Corey Brooks, who was present, told Aldertrack. According to youth advocacy leader Jedidiah Brown:

"There was something about how 'if you don’t encourage peace, don’t look to me for resources.'"

Emanuel clarified that what he really meant "was that resources he’d use to get jobs [would have to be] use[d] to clean up the city of Chicago,” Rev. Brooks told Aldertrack. But that really doesn't sound much better! The mayor's office refused to comment to Aldertrack.

Emanuel told Politico today that he has no plans to resign, even as calls for him to step down are ringing ever-louder, with scathing op-eds appearing in the New York Times and Washington Post. Whatever the case, it is very unlikely anything at all will happen or change because of the wheel-spinning police accountability task force he threw together in a seeming attempt to appease Chicago's police reform activist communities. The only possible positive outcome to this: the city appears to be wavering in its opposition to releasing the dashcam video for another police shooting of a young black man, Ronald Johnson.

[Emanuel images via Flickr]