Chicago will equip police officers with 1,400 body cameras in a major expansion of a yearlong pilot program designed to boost oversight of cops as protesters assail the department for incidents such as an officer's videotaped killing of 17-year-old Laquan McDonald, reports the Chicago Sun-Times. Since January, officers have been testing 30 body cameras in olne district. After a Sun-Times story last week that the slow-moving pilot program was showing promising results but was expected to move only into one more district in January, city officials say they will expand the program into six more police districts throughout Chicago by mid-2016.
Up and down the city’s Magnificent Mile on “Black Friday,” hundreds of activists protesting the fatal shooting of McDonald attempted to bring a halt to commerce on the busiest shopping day of the year. “I’m an American!” hollered an angry woman as she made a doomed attempt to force her way through the scrum of protesters into an Apple store, the Chicago Tribune reports. “I just want to get in the store. … I just want to shop!” Protesters blocked the entrances to dozens of high-end stores, turning a handful of customers away by force and dissuading many more simply by their presence.