Rev. Ira Acree, pastor of the Greater St. John Bible Church in Austin, said nothing has changed since the Laquan McDonald murder.
“Trigger happy cops are still engaged in senseless murder,” he said. “We don’t trust IPRA. We don’t trust Mayor Emanuel’s hand-picked blue ribbon police accountability board … We don’t trust Mayor Emanuel.”
“They murdered my momma for nothing!” LaTonya Jones yelled from her porch, just feet away from where her mother had drawn her last breaths. “She didn’t do nothing! All she did was open the door and they shot her!”
“It’s unconscionable to many of us how this could have happened given the level of scrutiny on the police department,” said Rev. Marshall Hatch, New Mt. Pilgrim’s pastor. “Given the Department of Justice is in town, how could such a reckless act have happened.”
Cook County Commissioner Richard Boykin (1st) said that all police officers should be required to wear Tasers and should have to undergo more training in crisis intervention and in dealing with the mentally challenged.
Jones’s family members stated that, as their mother lay dying, the police kept them from her body and handled the mourning relatives disrespectfully.
“One of the daughters asked the police, ‘Why did you shoot my mother?’ The officer said, ‘Your mother’s dead, get over it,'” said Rogers.
Jones’s seven-year-old granddaughter Saniya Marzette, who wasn’t present at the scene of the shooting, recounted what her grieving relatives were told by police.
“They said, ‘Knock it off, yo momma dead!'” Marzette said through sobs.
“When she opened the door, they opened fire on her,” said Theresa Marzette, Saniya’s mother, who also wasn’t present at the scene, but arrived at the house shortly after the shooting happened. “They didn’t ask her any questions. She said, ‘Whoa, whoa, wait a minute.’ The police are worse than the gangs outside. You can’t trust them. You can’t even open the door for them.”
Antiviolence advocate Tio Hardmian, a friend of the Jones family, spoke against CPD’s culture of disrespect toward blacks.
“You have some trigger happy police officers who said, ‘The hell with the national investigation.’ You have a disrespectful culture of police. There are some good police, but a number of them are just disrespectful and have no regard for the black community. They wouldn’t act this way in the Caucasian community. They have no morals or scruples about [killing blacks]. The mindset is shoot first, ask questions later.”
Cook County Circuit Court Clerk Dorothy Board, who sits on the Illinois Law Enforcement Training Board, pledged to work with the board “to come up with new ways of training law enforcement” throughout the state.
“I asked the board at the last meeting to make a change in the way we’re training our police officers,” she said. “We have some good police officers, but we also have a [a lot of room for improvement].”
Adeline Bracy, a spokesperson for the social justice group Action Now, of which Jones was a member, said the police “have been killing people systematically in all 50 states.”
“They go to the police academy, where they’re trained by some idiots, because they don’t have sensitivity, they kill people and go to State’s Attorneys like Alvarez and they get off,” Bracy said angrily.
Bracy said her group is going to start a massive voter registration drive to vote Emanuel and Alvarez out of office. Hardiman said he’s launching his own operation to pressure some of Emanuel’s largest political donors, such as billionaire hedge fund manager Kenneth C. Griffin.
Meanwhile, Rogers, the Jones family attorney, said there are still a lot of questions that need to be answered by the police department.
“We’re trying to find out who the officers were who did the shooting, where they were positioned, when they did the shooting, where [Jones’s] position was when she was shot — all those are questions we’re looking into.”
Article Appeared @http://www.austinweeklynews.com/News/Articles/12-28-2015/’All-she-did-was-open-the-door,’-says-daughter-of-woman-slain-by-police/