As his tenure as Chicago’s mayor comes to a close, Rahm Emanuel is attempting a public relations metamorphosis. Last year, Emanuel announced that he would not seek a third term just days before the trial of former police officer Jason Van Dyke, who murdered 17-year-old Laquan McDonald in 2015, was set to begin. Full of bravado in his early days as mayor, Emanuel has spent recent months legacy shopping and attempting to shore up his next act. The timing of Emanuel’s decision not to seek a third term, coupled with the legal consequences of McDonald’s death playing out in the final days of his administration, makes for a pretty damning narrative. But in politics, narratives are often composed of reshuffled parts, assembled by pundits in order to tell a more appealing or strategic story — and it appears that Emanuel just might escape the checkered legacy of his administration by crafting himself a new role in the world of punditry.
From the second-degree murder conviction of Van Dyke, to Emanuel’s sacrificial dismissal of Police Superintendent Garry McCarthy after the cover-up of McDonald’s murder was exposed, Emanuel’s administration has been marked by high profile acts of state violence. In 2015, Emanuel defended police practices at Chicago’s now-infamous Homan Square facility, despite The Guardian’s findings that “no contemporaneous public record of someone’s presence at Homan Square is known to exist,” meaning that a person jailed at Homan Square is effectively “disappeared” into the system — a practice that significantly increased under the Emanuel administration.
In 2014, after hearing from a delegation of Black Chicago youth and studying a shadow report presented by Chicago youth, which activists described as revealing “the disturbing and intolerable truth that [Chicago] police officers regularly engage in torture,” the United Nations Committee Against Torture expressed “deep concern at the frequent and recurrent [Chicago] police…