Vol. 79/No. 36 October 12, 2015
Servin, who was off duty, got into a verbal altercation with a group of youths near his home and one of the young men allegedly walked toward the detective’s vehicle holding a cellphone. Servin pulled his gun and fired five shots, killing Boyd.
Servin was stripped of his police powers in November 2013 and charged with involuntary manslaughter, reckless discharge of a firearm and reckless conduct. However, he walked out of the courtroom a free man April 20 after Associate Judge Dennis Porter dismissed the charges.
The day before the demonstration the City of Chicago Independent Police Review Authority, established in 2007 to investigate allegations of police misconduct, recommended that Servin be fired.
Some 100 demonstrators cheered as Angela Helton, Boyd’s mother; Martinez Sutton, Boyd’s brother; and other members of her family made their way through the crowd to attend the meeting. While the majority of protesters were African-American a significant number were Latino, Asian or Caucasian. More than 20 fast-food workers wearing “Fight for 15” T-shirts joined the protest.
“I’m here to support Rekia Boyd’s family,” Adriana Sanchez, a Fight for $15 activist and worker at McDonald’s in downtown Chicago, told the Militant. “The whole system of policing does not treat working people with respect,” she said, describing her own experiences with cop harassment.
“I came out today to help make sure Servin gets fired,” said Dorothy Holmes. Her son Ronald “Ronnieman” Johnson was gunned down by a Chicago cop last October. “I also want to make people aware of what happened to my son and demand that the Chicago Police Department release the dash-cam video of the shooting, which shows he was shot in the back.”
For the past five months three organizations of mostly African-American youth involved in the fight against police brutality here — Black Lives Matter Chicago, Black Youth Project 100 Chicago chapter, and We Charge Genocide — have organized demonstrations inside and outside Chicago Police Board meetings to demand the firing of Servin and to draw attention to police killings of Black women.
Scott Ando, chief administrator of the Independent Police Review Authority, told the board there were three reasons to fire Servin — for firing his weapon into a crowd in violation of the Police Department’s deadly force guidelines, for failing to qualify with the weapon he was carrying and using at the time, and for making contradictory statements during the police investigation.
Protesters demand cop be fired
When the floor was opened to the public, several people demanded Servin be fired, among them Mark Clements, a leader of the successful fight to prosecute and convict former police commander Jon Burge, who had organized a gang of cops who engaged in torture and frame-ups on Chicago’s South and West sides in the 1970s and ’80s. Tortured into confessing to a crime he did not commit, Clements spent 28 years behind bars.“It’s not only Servin who should be fired,” Clements told the board. “There are still more than 100 people, mostly African-American men, who were framed for crimes they did not commit, based on false confessions elicited through torture by Burge and his subordinates. And some of those subordinates, like detectives Kenneth Boudreau and James O’Brien, are still on the police force.”
“I live in the Douglas Park neighborhood four blocks from where Dante Servin lives,” said Frank Bergh, a Caucasian who is a member of Standing Up for Racial Justice. “I’m here to ask you to fire him. I don’t feel safe as long as someone like Servin remains on the force.”
“I’m kind of uneasy about [Police Superintendent Garry] McCarthy making the right decision,” said Sutton. “He said Servin should never have been charged, that the shooting was justified. That’s been one of the hardest things to live with — that this public official is saying that it’s right for my sister to have died.
“Not only Servin should be fired. The cops who killed Ronald Johnson, Rashad McIntosh, Laquan McDonald and Dakota Bright need to go too,” Sutton said, referring to other victims of police brutality here.
“This is not just a Black thing. It’s not just Black people who are concerned about this,” Sutton told the board. “Look at who’s here. This is about all of us.”
At a rally outside, Sutton thanked all present for their support. “When we get tired and overwhelmed,” he said, “you all pick us up. When I feel like I’m on empty, you are my fuel.”
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