Associated Press
Federal and county prosecutors are investigating the October fatal shooting by a Chicago police officer of a teenager who authorities say was wielding a knife, and the city says it will pay his family $5 million to preclude any legal action.
The Chicago City Council’s Finance Committee said Monday that it agreed to settle with the family of 17-year-old Laquan McDonald, who was shot 16 times. Chicago Corporation Counsel Stephen Patton recommended the settlement and told reporters that dashboard camera footage of the Oct. 20 shooting prompted the city’s decision to settle with the family before a lawsuit was filed.
The entire council is expected to vote on the settlement Wednesday.
“We consider his case like we consider every case based on all the evidence, all the facts, and it included the video, yes,” Patton said. “Here that was an important part of the evidence.”
Attorney Mike Robbins, who represents McDonald’s family, told WBBM-AM Chicago that a “fair and prompt resolution” was reached with the city without the necessity of litigation.
“We think the city did the right thing here,” he said.
A spokesman for Chicago Police Superintendent Garry McCarthy said the unidentified officer who shot McDonald has been stripped of his police powers and put on paid desk duty.
Read More Chicago To Pay $5 Million To Family Teen Shot 16 Times By Cop While Allegeldly Wielding Knife.
soulbrotherspeaks.com 
Walter Scott: Week by bloody week, my America is sliding back towards slavery
By Michael W. Twitty
My own direct ancestor was present at the moment the 240-year nightmare of American slavery came to an abrupt end and he was surrounded by thousands of black troops empowered to fight and, if necessary, kill to preserve freedom on American soil. It must have been an emotionally overwhelming moment, fraught with possibility and innumerable unknowns. Elijah would go on to own land, become a pillar of his community and the patriarch of a family where everyone could read and write.
Stories like that should have been the basis of a new American dream. At any point after the American Revolution, the Civil War and other key flashpoints, the US could have forged a completely new covenant vis-a-vis black America.
We are left aching for the moment in the past when paths diverged in a wood and our nation chose complete equality over laws and policies curtailing our collective well-being. In the African American experience, this theory of history is known as “two steps forward and one step back”.
The would-be framing and murder of Walter Scott in North Charleston, South Carolina by police officer Michael Slager stands as yet another example of the brazen war on everyday people of colour, protests be damned. Pulled over for a broken tail-light and shot in the back eight times after attempting to run away – apparently to avoid arrest for unpaid child support – Scott’s death further sheds light on an unsavoury truth. His murder is not paradoxical in the shadow of emancipation’s anniversary. It fits a wider cycle of great promise followed by reversal of gains against a symptom of the seasons of race to which the African American experience has been inextricably bound. The ideal that we are on a linear path to justice, equality or freedom is not borne out.
Read More Walter Scott: week by bloody week, my America is sliding back towards slavery | Michael Twitty | Comment is free | The Guardian.