Chicago’s 911 center received multiple calls of suspicious activity, a fight and even a man with a gun in the nearly 40 minutes leading up to the fatal shooting of a man at a rowdy Lincoln Park bar late Sunday night, CPD radio broadcasts show. But the local precinct had already been “backlogged” for nearly two hours, meaning dispatchers had no patrol units available to handle incoming service requests, and those calls did not result in a police response until it was too late.
The radioactivity shows that dispatchers in the Near North (18th) District had been in a backlog since 10pm on Sunday, officially known as Radio Assignment Pending or RAP status. While not uncommon at any time of day, RAPs are especially common during shift changes, one of which was ongoing as calls piled up before the shooting. Contributing to the problem: The district’s manpower has fallen in recent months from 387 officers to 324 in June, a 16% drop, according to the Chicago Office of Inspector General.
About 38 minutes before the murder, a caller reported a suspicious situation involving people in a car a few doors north of where the shooting later occurred in the 2200 block of North Lincoln Avenue. No other details about the situation were shared on air.
About half an hour later, the dispatcher reported another call of “40 to 50 men” fighting at the exact address where 30-year-old Malik McCorkle would soon be killed. The request for police duty, while read on air, was not assigned to any patrol unit.
Two minutes later, as per protocol, the dispatcher read out a list of all 911 calls awaiting a police response in the area, a total of 19 assignments, mostly minor. But three of them were within a radius of where the shooting would take place: the suspect car, the forty to fifty men fighting and a car crash.
Two minutes later the fight call became more serious. A 911 caller reported that the battery in progress had become a person with a gun, and that a black man wearing a white shirt had a gun at the scene, radio recordings show. Again, while the call was read on air, no CPD unit had been assigned to handle the case.
Finally, four minutes after the “man with a gun” call was unassigned, the dispatcher announced that they had received “multiple calls” of shots fired, that a fight had spilled from a bar onto the street, and that someone had been shot. Suddenly, a stream of units announced they were moving toward the shooting, and a tactical unit reported within seconds that it was on the scene with a person shot.
Surveillance video obtained by WGN-TV shows three men had firearms on the sidewalk, including one man, apparently McCorkle, who was wearing a white shirt. The video shows two of the armed men side by side, facing McCorkle, who was a few feet away, in something of a standoff. Suddenly, one of the two men standing together appears to fire a shot, and the second man fires.
Officers found McCorkle lying on the sidewalk outside a bank. He had been shot in the head and throughout his body. Police also found a gun, possibly McCorkle’s, at the scene. Both shooters fled before police arrived, but one of them, a concealed carrier, returned about 45 minutes later and surrendered to CPD. Police said charges were pending Monday evening.
Monday morning, Ald. Timmy Knudsen (43rd) said his office has led an “aggressive push for further restrictions on late-night bars on this stretch of Lincoln Avenue” since another shooting seriously injured a 39-year-old woman just steps away from Sunday’s June 7 shooting.
“I am hopeful and confident that the Ministry of Business Affairs & Consumer Protection will view this murder as sufficient evidence of the need to support specific restrictions on this route,” Knudsen said. He added that the CPD would add “a permanent patrol during weekend hours” to the bar strip on Lincoln Avenue.
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