Rahm Emanuel’s days as mayor of Chicago may be numbered as even his former boss is now using a shooting of an unarmed black teen as an example of bad policing.
While campaigning in Iowa for his wife Thursday, Bill Clinton made the case for community policing, and used the example of the death of Laquan McDonald of what his wife wouldn’t do.
“We’ve got to do more to knit the communities and the police back together,” Clinton said.
“We see on television that child in Chicago filled full of bullets unarmed. A mentally ill man who had no more business than the man in the moon with a gun, waving a gun around he never fired, walking away from police officers and 33 bullets fired when he was long on the ground, clearly wounded.”
The former president then contrasted the actions of Rahm Emanuel’s police force with that of the one in San Bernardino, California as it confronted two radical Islamic terrorists attacking a work Christmas party.
“And then we see the heroism of the police in San Bernardino, what they did in rushing to the site trying to save lives. When there is a community relationship with the police, they trust each other. Occasionally, when people fire guns bad things happen, even when you don’t intend it.
“But you don’t have to have a riot if you have a system for truly finding the facts and then figuring out together what to do,” Clinton said.
“You can only do that when we trust each other again, when we put the country back together again — that’s what she wants to do.”
Clinton’s comments will likely rub salt in Emanuel’s wounds as he’s trying to keep his job amid calls for his resignation.
“Hey hey, ho ho, Rahm Emanuel has got to go,” protesters chanted in downtown Chicago in November.
They’ve protested outside his house, too.
“No matter what happens, we’re going to continue to come to his house, continue to go to city hall, continue to shut down the money until he resigns — and we’re not letting up,” a protester said on the sidewalk outside the mayor’s residence.
Emanuel was a senior advisor to Bill Clinton when he was in the White House, according to Discover the Networks.
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