I-Team: The events leading up to Maurice Granton shooting

ByChuck Goudie and Barb Markoff, Christine Tressel and Ross Weidner WLS logo
Thursday, July 26, 2018
I-Team: the events leading up to Maurice Granton shooting
Police videos released on Wednesday show officers focusing in on Maurice Granton in the minutes preceding a fatal encounter.

CHICAGO (WLS) -- An examination of all the police video released Wednesday from the fatal shooting of Maurice Granton, Jr., shooting videos reveals that police had their eyes on the 24-year-old South Side resident.

Chicago police say they were conducting a drug investigation on June 6 and their cameras seem to follow Granton first as he rides a bicycle on East 47th Street. He is also seen approaching a car on 47th Street and conducting what appears to be a cash transaction. This seems to be about a half-hour before Granton was shot. The video was released on Wednesday by the Civilian Office of Police Accountability.

Granton was also known to Chicago police gang officers who work the Bronzeville beat.

His Chicago police arrest report lists eight entries between the time Granton was 19 and 22 years of age for drug, robbery and parole violations among other things. Facebook pictures also show Granton and guns.

This summer, on the early evening of Wednesday June 6, officers obviously had their eyes on Granton and several other people who were congregating on East 47th. Granton is seen counting a wad of cash as he socializes on a congested stretch of sidewalk.

Although the video is dark and not clear, police contend at one point on the surveillance that Granton can be seen removing a pistol from a lower pocket in his cargo pants-a gun they said he would use a short time later while running from police.

Drug offenses account for nearly 70-percent of all arrests in Illinois. Even though drug arrests have fallen 50-percent here in the past decade, Chicago police last year still made more than 11,000 arrests on drug charges, many times the result of surveillance operations like that one on 47th street in early June.

The pod video released today shows officers moments after the shooting, swarming a fence line where Granton was brought down. It was a violent and fatal ending to a routine police surveillance operation.