The late July detention and beating of a young Palestinian American boy seemed to be the catalyst for yet another charge of police brutality by police in Palos Hills, Illinois as they stopped a car without a front license plate and the aroma of cannabis. While one of the teens cooperated with the search, another 17-year-old Hadi Abuatelah, by Oak Lawn police, allegedly beat him ten times on his shoulders, and also a fractured pelvis and intracranial bleeding among other injuries.
Police have not released the body camera film, but a passerby recorded the incident on her cell phone, in a one minute footage, that also prompted cries of outrage against excessive force on the teen who appeared to weigh 120 pounds.
Newsweek reported that the police claim there was no bodycam video, and since the recording only shows the beating, there remain many unanswered questions.
The Council on American-Islamic Relations-Chicago has joined with Abuatelah's family and has “filed a civil rights lawsuit against the officers and the village, alleging police used excessive force and the officers and department engaged in “racially motivated conspiracy” to deprive the teen of his civil rights,” reported Suburbanchicagoland.com.
An assault gun was found at the scene and there was suspicion that the teen had it in his accessories bag, slung over his shoulder. One report described the weapon as “a Raven Arms P2 25 25 Caliber Semi Automatic weapon with three rounds of ammunition and a THC Vape cartridge which he later admitted to smoking.”
According to the police statements.after he was captured, Abuatelah tried to keep the bag throughout the incident,
"Regardless of the alleged infraction that led to the arrest, the video clearly shows a restrained teenager in submission, not resisting, being brutally beaten by three officers without justification," Council on American Islamic Relations Chicago Executive Director Ahmed Rehab said.
Oaklawn police say that they are conducting their own internal investigation.
According to The New York Times, “Zaid Abdallah, the boy’s lawyer, said that Hadi was a passenger in the vehicle. The lawyer said he did not know what the traffic stop was about or why Hadi had decided to flee.”
Oak Lawn police Chief Daniel Vittorio claimed the officers “feared Abuatelah was reaching for a weapon, and used management ways to launch the teen’s arms.”
“You have him subdued,” he said. “If he broke the law, we have a process for that in America. You arrest the person. He goes to bond court. He goes to his preliminary hearing. He goes to trial court. This is the process. The process is not smash his head into the pavement.”
“Regardless of the alleged infraction that led to the arrest, the video clearly shows a restrained teenager in submission, not resisting, being brutally beaten by three officers without justification,” Ahmed Rehab, executive director of CAIR-Chicago, said in a statement. “The issue here is excessive force and police brutality. Something we are seeing again and again and again.”
There are also claims that the teen was tased.
Claims of ongoing racism in this community have acerbated reactions, with the largest community of Palestinians and Palestinian Americans in the country, displaced from the West Bank after Israeli occupation.
In a statement from the AAAN, they said, “In addition to the demand that the three Oak Lawn police officers be fired, the AAAN has also been pressing Cook County State's Attorney Kim Foxx nonstop for over two weeks to drop the charges against Hadi and instead charge the officers who viciously beat him.”
The next court date is Aug. 25.
Internally, a dust up between CPD Chief David Brown and Robert Boik, erupted after the latter insisted on the terms of the Consent Decree with the Federal government that was made in the twilight of the Obama Administration.
Boik had learned that there were 46 officers that had to be sent back to patrol duties, instead of the required in-service training mandated by the terms of the decree, reported The Chicago Tribune.
“In Boik’s email, which was obtained by the Tribune, he said that if those individuals were moved to patrol, there would be 21 fewer instructors at the academy and the department would no longer be able to offer an eight-hour gender-based violence course to officers this year.”
Furthermore, “The decision would also result in 10 fewer people in the crisis intervention training program, which would diminish the program by about 30%, according to the email. Putting these individuals on patrol would also put a minimum of 8% of the department’s current consent-decree compliance at risk.
“Beyond the consent decree requirement to train our frontline officers, we have a fundamental obligation to ensure all our officers are provided with equal tools to do their jobs in the field. With the proposed cuts, every single officer will fall short of 40 hours of training this year,” Boik wrote in the email.”
The back and forth continued with Brown wanting to address city wide violence and Boik countering that his “email suggested that his staff would be moving to districts all over the city and “therefore will likely have minimal impact on patrol capacity for any one district.”
Praise and disappointment, at the decision, overflowed local media with the Tribune saying, “Arne Duncan, a managing partner of Emerson Collective and the founder of violence prevention organization Chicago CRED, wrote in a statement: “Bob Boik was fired for blowing the whistle and telling the truth — that he has no support and that the administration is not serious about police reform. Trust between the police and community is already far too low, and losing him is a big step in the wrong direction. That is dangerous for our city, for the community and for our police officers.”
There seems to be a pattern arising, and “Chad Williams, the former civilian commanding officer of the Police Department’s audit division, resigned in 2021 after emailing Mayor Lori Lightfoot to say he had been proud to lead the unit but had become disillusioned and was resigning his post.
“Unfortunately, my disappointment with the inability of this department’s top leadership to even feign interest in pursuing reform in a meaningful manner has made it impossible for me to remain involved,” Williams wrote in the email, as previously reported by the Tribune. “
Of the most pressing problems for Chicago is crime, rampant crime with carjacking's, robbery, theft and personal assault. Mayor Lightfoot, placed on the hot seat, has said that there have been improvements and that murders and shootings are down,16 and 18 percent, at the close of the 32nd week of 2022, yet some including Wirepoints and WBBM suggest that those numbers fail to include the baseline year of 2019, just before the Covid pandemic and the murder of George Floyd, the reaction of illegitimate protestors, and those that tagged along to loot and rob.
If that is taken into account, they say, then the numbers look worse, 31 and 33 percent respectively, yet that aside, the public perception that the city is not safe is dominant across the dinner tables and boardrooms of the city, and some companies have left the city such as Ken Griffin’s Citadel to Miami.
WBBM reported that “Lightfoot said her administration’s efforts are bearing fruit, including an 18% drop in homicides over last year.
“But when told many residents still don’t feel safe, she fired back:
“The perception, if it’s not accurately reported by the media, will continue to fuel a feeling that the entire city isn’t safe,” Lightfoot said. “It is important for our residents to know that we have a plan that we have implemented that is showing progress. And it’s critical that the media report that.”
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The problem is that the plan has not been seen. And, on the city’s iconic El subway system, especially the Red Line, crime is rampant and there have been well documented reports in the media of people with bloodied faces, and passengers fending off gangs with their own weapons, and knives, often resulting in loss of life on both sides.
The police force assigned to the CTA has been reduced and there are concerns in some quarters of over policing that might result in racial profiling, but the volunteer force, and hired guards with dogs, have been mainly used to remove the unhoused, as they seek shelter on trains and buses.
Police have pointed to low ridership, due to Coviid, as being less of a deterrent to crime, but statistics cited are often inconsistent, and the use of the crime database was called, “tricky for all but the most hardcore data nerds to use, said Wirepoints.
There have been long standing issues with crime on CTA trains, for years, but now it has also spread to buses, where last summer, a man riding in broad daylight on a bus, in the River North area, (a gentrified neighborhood), was stabbed by a woman, later determined to be mentally ill.
In May, the situation intensified to the point where Sen. Dick Durbin (D) of Illinois and US Rep Jesus “Chuy” Garcia wrote a letter to the CTA, and they said, in part:
“While we appreciate the efforts that both the CTA and Chicago Police Department recently have made to increase passenger and employee safety on trains and buses throughout the CTA’s network, more needs to be done to protect CTA’s frontline workers and passengers given the alarming increase in crime on the CTA system,”
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