Twitter Video Of Cop Shooting On CTA Should Inspire Policy Change

CHICAGO — Twitter saved us from having to guess whether the police shooting of Ariel Roman at a CTA Red Line station last week matched up with how cops would describe the incident in reports.

As cynical as it might sound, there's just no telling whether police will embellish reports in an attempt to justify shooting a man who is running away from them. That's been an unfortunate truth in our town since we learned that dashcam video didn't jibe with the account of what happened the night officer Jason Van Dyke murdered Laquan McDonald in police reports.

This time, thanks to a Twitter video recorded by a civilian, we didn't have to wait more than a year to see what happened for ourselves. The video appears to show that rather than risk Roman's escape — he was stopped for the high crime of jumping between trains — one officer told his partner to shoot. And she did. Twice. Roman took a one bullet in the abdomen and another in the buttocks.

“Extremely disturbing,” is how Mayor Lori Lightfoot described her take on the shooting from the perspective of the cell phone video.

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That’s not all. Firing shots in a River North CTA stop also seems extremely stupid. And it's probably going to be extremely expensive — for taxpayers that fund lawsuits alleging police misconduct, that is.

You can see that pretty clearly on Twitter. And that's probably why interim police Superintendent Charlie Beck, who clearly isn’t from around here, did something arguably more unusual than shooting a guy over an alleged misdemeanor.

[Warning: video may be disturbing to some readers.]

After finding out that officers pressed charges against Roman alleging resisting arrest and dope possession, Chicago’s top cop didn’t blindly support the charging document. He asked Cook County State’s Attorney Kim Foxx to drop all charges. She rightly decided getting shot twice was punishment enough for Roman, who obviously could have avoided getting shot by complying with the arresting officers. Perhaps nobody involved in Roman's arrest acted appropriately.

There is, however, an unlikely hero in this story — Michael G. McDunnah, a writer and podcaster also known as @freerangecritic on Twitter.

Things that occurred after his tweet went viral — Mayor Lightfoot’s reaction, Superintendent Beck’s common-sense call to drop the charges and immediate investigation launched by the FBI — might not have happened so swiftly, or at all.

McDunnah’s Twitter video offered compelling proof that traditional City Hall arguments for keeping police-involved shooting videos secret — union contract provisions, state laws, city ordinances and the age-old favorite, protecting the integrity of active investigations — are fatally flawed.

Chicagoans shouldn’t have to rely on guys like McDunnah to commit random acts of transparency to see video when police shoot. We've got taxpayer-funded dashcams, body cams and street-corner surveillance cameras that should be made public when that happens.

As things stand, Chicagoans are forced to wait two months — unless there's a request to keep them secret longer — to see video recordings of police-involved shootings. That city policy was something of a compromise put into place after former Mayor Rahm Emanuel's administration got harshly criticized for fighting to keep video of McDonald's murder secret while he ran for re-election.

Watching a Chicago cop shoot Roman on Twitter is reminder that any delay releasing videos of police-involved shootings to the public is too long to wait.

It’s time to do something about that.

Mark Konkol, recipient of the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for local reporting and Emmy-nominated producer, was a producer, writer and narrator for the "Chicagoland" docu-series on CNN. He was a consulting producer on the Showtime documentary, "16 Shots."

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• Don't Quit, Kim! Let Voters Express Facebook Outrage Election Day
• 750,000 Reasons Sun-Times' Kim Foxx Endorsement Shouldn't Shock