Embattled Mayor Rahm Emanuel offered a plaintive apology Wednesday for his responsibility in the city's handling of the shooting death of a black teenager by a Chicago police officer.
Emanuel said the city is at a "defining moment" and that Chicago needs to go through a "painful but honest reckoning" not just in the case of last year's shooting death of Laquan McDonald, 17, but "over decades" of mounting public distrust of the city's police department.
The mayor, a former three-term U.S. congressman and chief of staff to President Obama, has been under fire since the city was forced by court order more than two weeks ago to release police dashboard video of the shooting death ofMcDonald.
Emanuel had long resisted releasing the dashcam video, citing ongoing federal and state criminal probes, but was forced to after an independent journalist successfully sued the city for the video under the state's Freedom of Information law.