CHICAGO (AP) — A woman whose 13-month-old son was struck and killed as he sat in his stroller at a bus stop during a high-speed police chase this month in Chicago is suing the city, saying officers ignored orders by their superiors to stop the pursuit.
“My son was innocent and he should not have died,” Shatrell McComb said during a Thursday morning news conference about the lawsuit in which several unidentified Chicago police officers are defendants, as is the city of Chicago. The lawsuit also names Antoine Watkins, the man officers were chasing and who is charged with first-degree murder in young Dillan Harris’ death.
McComb’s attorney, Antonio Romanucci, said Dillan’s death was “the direct result of a chase that should not have happened,” saying that he had “direct evidence” that the officers were told to stop sometime during the 3 1/2 mile, 20-minute chase on the South Side, not far from the University of Chicago campus. He declined to say what that evidence was.
Romanucci has requested, but not received, audio recordings of communications between the officers and their superiors or dashcam footage, and also said he has filed legal documents demanding that the city preserve the recording and footage. The Associated Press has also made a formal request for the audio recording and the dashcam footage.
A police spokesman declined comment because litigation is pending.
Authorities have said police were pursuing Watkins in the early afternoon of July 11 after 22-year-old Marvin Carr, a rapper who also went by Capo, was shot and killed. An off-duty Chicago Aviation Department officer heard gunfire and notified police that a man, later identified as Watkins, climbed into a red Toyota.
Several minutes later, prosecutors say, Watkins lost control of the vehicle, which jumped a sidewalk, then struck and dragged the stroller at a bus stop, where McComb and Dillan were waiting for a bus to go to the beach.
Romanucci said that one of the factors that should have prompted the officers to stop the chase was that they had a detailed description of both the vehicle and the license plate number — information that allows police to “apprehend the suspect at a later time.”
He also said that officers should have slowed down because they were in a crowded residential neighborhood on a busy Saturday afternoon.
“At a certain point you actually have to let them go … because somebody will die,” he said.
Romanucci wondered whether the officers would have stopped pursuing the vehicle as he said they were ordered to do had they been in one of Chicago’s affluent neighborhoods and not on the predominantly black South Side.
“I’m asking the Chicago Police Department would they have continued this same chase if the incident had occurred” in those neighborhoods, he asked. “The trust has to be the same in the neighborhoods on the South Side of Chicago and the North Side and we don’t see that being applied equally here.”
By Don Babwin | Associated Press
http://news.yahoo.com/chicago-police-sued-high-speed-chase-killed-baby-162634412.html
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WHAT A MESS: NEW REPORT FROM BERKLEE COLLEGE OF MUSIC LOOKS TO FIX AN AGING, FRACTURED BUSINESS
The central theme to “Fair Music: Transparency And Money Flows In The Music Industry,” a 29-page report being released today (July 14) by the Berklee College of Music and its Rethink Music initiative may just be: What a mess.
The 29-page report, led by associate professor Allen Bargfrede, undertakes a close read of the music industry’s many rusty, interlocking cogs — performance rights organizations, collection societies, subscription services, major labels, digital retailers, publishing companies. This detailed analysis afforded Bargfrede and his contributors an eagle-eyed view of the many problems facing modern artists and their representatives.
The problems identified in the paper, nearly without exception, concern a failure to address and embrace “new” technologies that would give artists and their managers a clear picture of who is listening to what and how much they are owed for it. (Kobalt, the London-based digital services company which sells artists tools with which to monitor real-time usage of their work as well as administration of payments, is an underwriter of Berklee’s Rethink Music project.)
One particularly illuminating case study focuses on the confusing and error-filled royalty statements provided to a Grammy-nominated band by its label, which arrived in a novella-sized paper binder that the band’s manager had digitized in order to make digestible. “For an artist to try to understand it, it’s a complete mess,” Bargfrede tells Billboard. “If there’s one key takeaway [from the report], it’s this inapplication of technology and data standards that are already out there, that could be adopted and readily used, so artists aren’t getting 120-page paper statements that they don’t understand.” That statement, the report points out, was one of four the band would have received that year.
“Fair Music” also highlights the “black box” of royalties that go unremitted to the artists that are generated through their work. One major cause is the lack of a standardized database for musical works that would make it easy for labels and collection societies to identify who is owed what. “Services and [performance rights organizations] that can’t distinguish a rightful royalty recipient… end up placing this money into escrow accounts and eventually distributing these unattributable monies to labels and publishers based on market share,” the report reads. “Such monies are usually not shared with artists or composers signed to those labels or publishers, since they can’t be attributed to any rightful creator.”
Not to mention the nearly impenetrable laws that oversee performance and mechanical licenses and the subdivisions of recording and composition, all further fragmented by an apples-to-oranges global legal system.
This gets at a more strategic problem underpinning the industry — opacity and complexity by design. “Keeping things complex is not a bad business strategy,” Brian Message, Radiohead manager and former chair of the Music Manager’s Forum tells Billboard.
“The corporations that own the labels,” says Message, referring to companies like Vivendi, the France-based parent of Universal Music Group, “are conducting licensing practices for their own management and shareholder gain — and that, as a short term strategy is going to lead to long term problems.” Message is referring to large advances paid by streaming services to rights holders like Universal Music Group — revealed to the public in a leaked contract between Sony and Spotify earlier this year — that are not considered to be payable to artists if and when a streaming service does not use all of the licenses it paid for over the contract term.
“To some degree, the opacity benefits the people who are creating the opacity,” Bargfrede says. “Everyone in that value chain could contribute to helping make this process flow better than it currently does. One of the examples we use in the report is the air traffic control system — if they had implemented technology that already exists, we wouldn’t be looking for [Malaysia Airlines Flight 370] a year later. There’s technology that can solve these problems, but in a lot of cases it’s not being adopted.”
To that end, the report issues several specific recommendations, including the previously mentioned construction of a standardized creator database; legislative modernization around mechanical licenses, neighboring rights and the consent decrees which govern PROs like ASCAP and BMI; the establishment of a non-governmental organization that would oversee a “fair music” certification for businesses; and the use of the blockchain, the technology that underpins Bitcoin, for real-time royalty verification and payment (an idea highlighted just this past weekend in a story from CoinDesk).
Anyone with a working knowledge of the music industry’s labyrinthine structure won’t be shocked by what they read in “Fair Music” — but everyone else may be. And the report is only part one; Bargfrede will begin the second installment this fall in partnership with MIT and Harvard Business School.
“Can we bring creators on board, to sign on to an ethical set of standards?” For the sake of artists and their dwindling power, let’s hope so.
By Andrew Flanagan
Update: Our report originally failed to mention digital services company Kobalt’s underwriting of Berklee’s research. This has been added — Billboard regrets the omission.