Protesters blocked the entrance to the mayor’s annual Martin Luther King Jr. breakfast Friday morning as they encouraged people to boycott the gathering.

Surely this was not what the late Mayor Harold Washington envisioned when he hosted the first MLK breakfast in 1985. The event was a target for protest groups calling for the resignation of Chicago’s current Mayor Rahm Emanuel.

Shouting “shame on you, shame on you,” demonstrators locked arms and taunted invited guests as they entered the hotel. At least one group of women needed a police escort.

About a dozen intruders pushed their way inside past security to board the escalator to the second floor lobby. Chaos followed as protesters trying to enter the breakfast alongside invited guests were threatened with arrest.

“How dare you say you’ve had enough. We’ve had enough!” one protester said.

“Mayor Emanuel caters to the elite class. He will only invite people who support what he does which is closing 54 schools, police misconduct, suppressing evidence, covering up murders,” said Rev. Gregory Livingston, Coalition for a New Chicago.

“I don’t have a problem with Rahm Emanuel. Rahm Emanuel made a mistake, he’s trying to work it out and we’re working with him to work it out,” said Ald. Walter Burnett, 27th Ward.

Inside the ballroom, undercover protesters interrupted the program twice, shouting “”Sixteen shots! Sixteen shots and a cover-up!”

The advertised guest speaker, author Isabela Wilkerson who boycotters asked not to speak, did not appear. The crowded ballroom included many seniors, some who say they were invited within the past 24 hours.

“I did mine yesterday. Got your invitation yesterday? Yeah,” said Richard Lackey, a breakfast guest.

“This was not about me. It’s about Dr. King, his life and his life’s work,” said Mayor Rahm Emanuel.

The mayor – whose speech was not interrupted – said the event rededicated the city to Dr. King’s vision for social and economic justice.

He would not answer ABC7’s question about the keynote speaker’s no-show and did not stick around for questions about the boycotters or various protest groups.

“All of these groups are utilizing King tools, they’re utilizing King methods, to get the message out that we want justice,” said Tavis Grant, a boycott organizer.

Despite the pushing and shoving outside as well as inside the hotel, there were no arrests reported.

Some of the protesters outside the MLK breakfast also protested outside the Chicago Board of Trade Friday morning.

These demonstrators, led by the Coalition for a New Chicago, are part of the same group that disrupted holiday traffic on Black Friday and Christmas Day. They call the protest “Black Wall Street” and chose to march on Friday because it’s Dr. Martin Luther King’s birthday.

Less than a dozen people took part in the demonstration outside the Chicago Board of Trade, but their message was loud. They aimed to prevent employees from entering and prevent money from trade profits from flowing in the city.

“What we want to do is to bring the pain from the inner city to downtown. Many of the folk here at the Board of Trade – where billions of dollars are transacted every day – many of them are not aware that there are people in neighborhoods outside of downtown who don’t have schools, who don’t have hospitals, who don’t have clinics, who don’t have adequate infrastructure to live humane lives,” said Rev. Gregory Livingston, Coalition for a New Chicago.

In this June 8, 2010 file photo, former Chicago Police Lt. Jon Burge arrives at the federal building in Chicago. The city of Chicago has paid $5.5 million in reparations to dozens of people whose claims that they were tortured by a police unit commanded by Burge decades ago were found to be credible.

The city of Chicago has paid out $5.5 million in compensation to dozens of people who claimed to have been victims of police brutality decades ago.

The Chicago Sun-Times reported that all but “five or six” of the 57 people whose claims of being abused were deemed credible received $100,000. The others had received previous settlements and saw those amounts deducted from their share.

The checks have been mailed 44 years after the “first known instance” of torture by a police unit led by former commander Jon Burge and known as the “midnight crew.”

More than 100 men, most of them African-American, have accused Burge and officers under his command of shocking, suffocating and beating them into giving false confessions, some of which landed them on death row. Burge has never been criminally charged with torture, but he served a 4 ½-year sentence for lying about the torture in a civil case and was released from a halfway house last year.

“Reparations is not a necessity,” Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel told the Sun-Times. “But it is a moral compunction and a moral reckoning to right a wrong. There is no statute of limitations on that

The Sun-Times reports that the latest award to victims is a fraction of the estimated $100 million that has beenpaid in court-ordered judgments, settlements of lawsuits and legal fees — most of it spent by the financially strapped city of Chicago and some by Cook County — over the years related to the torture scandal. The $100,000 payment most victims received Monday is a fraction of some previous settlements.

The payments mark the latest black eye for the police department in the nation’s third-largest city, which has come under withering criticism since the release in November of a video showing white police officer Jason Van Dyke shooting black 17-year-old Laquan McDonald 16 times in 2014.

A months-long claims process for the payments included vetting by an arbitrator and by a professor at the Illinois Institute of Technology’s Kent School of Law.

The reparations were part of an ordinance the City Council passed last year that also mandated a formal apology, the construction of a memorial to the victims and the addition of the police torture to the city’s school history curriculum. It also provides psychological counseling and free tuition at some community colleges. Some of the benefits are available to victims’ children and grandchildren.

One torture victim, Darrell Cannon, said Monday that the payments were only the first step toward healing the city.

“We still have a long way to go,” he said.

Cannon was freed after 24 years in prison when a review board determined that evidence against him was tainted. The Sun-Times reported that Cannon has claimed that Burge’s officers played a game of Russian Roulette with him and shocked his genitals with a cattle prod.

Two days after Bettie Jones was shot dead by Chicago police, it remains unclear why the 55-year-old grandmother of five walked to the front door of her West Side home, the spot where she became what authorities called an “accidental” casualty of a “domestic disturbance.”

But her daughter has a theory about the one-time crossing guard. She was “just being a good citizen,” Latarsha Jones told NBC News. “Trying to help out.”

Bettie Jones, along with 19-year-old Quintonio LeGrier, her upstairs neighbor, who was also killed by police on Saturday morning, have become the latest symbols in a city roiled by anger over alleged police abuse.

Latarsha Jones and two of her sisters told NBC News on Monday that the events were “shocking” and “terrifying.”

Latisha Jones said her mother was probably just opening the front door for the police Saturday morning.

“She was probably thinking, ‘I’m going to open the door, let them in,” she said. “‘They’re going to go upstairs and handle whatever’s going on. I’m going to come back, close my door and get back in my bed.'”

Instead, Latisha added, “My mom wound up getting shot.”

Chicago police have said they “confronted a combative individual” just after 4 a.m. on Saturday. Friends and neighbors told NBC affiliate WMAQ that LeGrier — a college student at Northern Illinois University who was home on break — had recently shown signs of mental illness and was threatening his father with a baseball bat. When police arrived, they shot him seven times, his mother said.

His father, Antonio LeGrier, filed a lawsuit against the city Monday alleging that LeGrier was unarmed and “never posed a danger of threat or harm.”

Their deaths came just more than a month after the release of dash-cam videothat showed Chicago police Officer Jason Van Dyke firing 16 shots at 17-year-old Laquan McDonald. Protests erupted over the city’s handling of the killing and whether the authorities — including Mayor Rahm Emanuel — tried to cover it up.

Chicago police released a statement Saturday saying Jones was “accidentally struck and tragically killed” and Mayor Rahm Emanuel ordered the city’s Independent Police Review Authority — or IPRA — to examine the case. “I have asked that they determine the deficiencies in the current training, and determine what steps can be taken immediately to address them,” Emanuel said. “We will continue to ask tough questions of the police department, of the investigative agencies, and of ourselves, to drive the reforms the people of Chicago deserve and expect.”

The Jones family’s lawyer, Sam Adam Jr., assailed the authorities’ version of the incident, telling NBC News on Monday that “many” shell casings were found “down the street” from Jones’ home.

“That sort of activity certainly doesn’t comport with necessary and justifiable shooting when the shell casings are 15 to 20 feet away,” he said.

A Chicago police spokesman referred calls on the case to IPRA. A phone call to the authority on Monday was not immediately returned.

Thousands of protesters in Chicago are demanding the resignation of Mayor Rahm Emanuel over the police killing of Laquan McDonald last year, video of which was released last month. McDonald was shot 16 times by an officer while appearing to move away from him.

Last week, Emanuel fired the police chief, Garry McCarthy, who had served in that position since the beginning of Emanuel’s first term. Yesterday, Emanuel apologized for police misconduct in front of the City Council.

CBS news reports:

Emanuel addressed three main themes in his passionate speech: justice, culture and community. He also criticized the police department, which is being investigated by the U.S. Department of Justice, for being quick to shoot, saying the department’s “supervision and leadership,” as well as the oversight agencies, failed.

“I take responsibility for what happened because it happened on my watch. And if we’re going to fix it I want you to understand it’s my responsibility with you,” Emanuel said. “But if we’re also going to begin the healing process, the first step in that journey is my step.

The first step, of course, would be for Emanuel to resign. He didn’t. For him, the first step was a personal apology. The problems with the Chicago Police Department didn’t start with Emanuel (the city pays out an average of $1 million a week settling claims against the police), but they festered under him. Emanuel did not run for his first term advocating for police reforms and it was not a major issue in his re-election campaign.

His electoral success suggests either, a) Chicago voters at large are not as concerned by police misconduct as activists make it appear, or b) Chicago’s political system and institutions are broken and no longer responsive or particularly democratic.

If the former were true, Emanuel would probably not have felt the need to first fire McCarthy and then offer an apology. On the other hand, there’s quite a bit of evidence that Chicago’s political system is broken. The city government is rife with corruption, the “Chicago machine” is world famous. In the last sixty years, Chicago has only had two mayors that served two or more terms, Richard J. Daley, who was in office from 1955 until his death in 1976, and Richard M. Daley, who served from 1989 to 2011. In the eight years between Daleys, six people served as mayor, mostly in acting or interim capacities.

Chicago, like many major American cities facing an epidemic of police brutality and an utter lack of accountability for police misconduct, is a one-party city. That set up has a similar effect as it does in one-party countries—it stifles dissent, limits political debate, and erodes democratic institutions.

Last year, Emanuel won re-election over Chuy Garcia, who mainly ran a campaign against Emanuel’s modest efforts at returning Chicago to fiscal stability. Garcia did not make a major issue of police misconduct, and his politics suggest that he, like Emanuel, would not have done much to renegotiate police contracts in order to remove some of the systemic features that contribute to police brutality and the lack of accountability for police officers.

A resignation from Emanuel would not solve all of Chicago’s problems. But at least it would represent an acknowledgement of how severe those problems are.

Mayor Rahm Emanuel, known for keeping vise-like control over Chicago and his own political image, finds himself in the weakest position of his long public career as he struggles to respond to a police scandal, claims of cover-ups at City Hall and calls for his resignation.

But the former White House chief of staff has said repeatedly that he will not step down. The nation’s third-largest city has no process for a mayor to be recalled. And most of the cries for Emanuel to resign have come from grassroots activists and residents, not from the city’s political powerbrokers. The next election — should he seek another term — isn’t until 2019.

On Wednesday, the mayor used a special meeting of the Chicago City Council to try to calm the firestorm, apologizing for the fatal shooting of a black teen by a white officer and promising “complete and total” reform.

“I take responsibility for what happened because it happened on my watch. And if we’re going to fix it, I want you to understand it’s my responsibility with you,” Emanuel said during a sometimes-emotional speech that lasted nearly 45 minutes. “But if we’re also going to begin the healing process, the first step in that journey is my step.

“And I’m sorry.”

The remarks were Emanuel’s lengthiest and seemingly most heartfelt since the public got its first look last month at the squad car video that showed 17-year-old Laquan McDonald veering away from officer Jason Van Dyke before he began shooting, hitting McDonald 16 times. Van Dyke is charged with first-degree murder.

Critics have repeatedly accused him of keeping the footage under wraps until after he won a tougher-than-expected spring election for a second term. The mayor has denied the claim and acknowledged Wednesday that he should have pressed for prosecutors to wrap up their investigation sooner so the video could be made public.

But his contrition did little to ease the anger in the streets. Hours after the speech, protesters overflowed an intersection in front of City Hall, then marched through the financial district and blocked a major intersection for a short time as police directed traffic around them. Officers guarded the doors to the Chicago Board of Trade as demonstrators approached.

Outside City Hall, retired schoolteacher Audrey Davis carried a sign reading, “Mayor Emanuel is morally corrupt!”

Calling the speech “politically expedient,” Davis said, “I don’t want to hear anything from him except, ‘I tender my resignation.'”

Davis, who is black, said she fears for her 25-year-old grandson when he comes home from college.

“Each time he comes home, my heart is in my throat in case he meets up with a racist cop,” Davis said. “We shouldn’t have to live like this.”

Since the video emerged, Emanuel has scrambled to contain the crisis. He fired his police superintendent after days of insisting the chief had his support. He also reversed course on whether the Justice Department should launch a civil-rights investigation, saying he would welcome it only after presidential candidate Hillary Clinton and other top Democrats endorsed the idea.

In news conferences, he has appeared worn down, fumbling answers to reporters’ questions or avoiding them entirely by walking away, with cameras rolling.

“I don’t think I’ve ever seen him grapple with anything quite like this,” said longtime ally and adviser David Axelrod, who also served with Emanuel in the Obama White House.

Axelrod said Emanuel worked on the speech all weekend, with input from him and others. But he said the speech alone isn’t what matters.

“You don’t earn trust back with one speech,” Axelrod said. “You earn trust back with actions.”

The most likely effect of the crisis will come in the form of pushback from aldermen, who have long been considered a rubber stamp for the mayor’s initiatives, said political consultant Delmarie Cobb. She said the black community “has been awakened,” and Emanuel can expect a tougher re-election if he tries again.

“He definitely won’t run unopposed, and it will be a viable candidate,” said Cobb, who is black.

The mayor won re-election in April by a healthy margin, but only after suffering the embarrassment of not getting a majority in a five-candidate February election, forcing the first mayoral runoff in decades.

At the time, he pledged to listen more and to “bridge the gaps between the things that divide us.”

In the months that followed, his public schools CEO, who oversaw closings of about 50 schools that angered many residents, was indicted on corruption charges. Emanuel also pushed through the largest tax increase in city history to deal with a budget crisis.

His administration has warned of massive mid-year layoffs in the public schools and is in the midst of rocky contract negotiations with the Chicago Teachers Union. This week, union members are voting on whether to authorize a strike. They could hit the picket lines as early as March.

After the video was made public, other flashpoints kept coming. Footage was released of another police shooting — this one deemed justified by prosecutors — and of another man who died in police custody. A review by the city’s quasi-independent police watchdog agency showed that of 409 shootings involving police since 2007, the agency found only two with credible allegations against an officer.

Police reports from the McDonald shooting included officer accounts that differed dramatically from the video.

In his speech, Emanuel noted the problems are ones that have plagued Chicago for decades, and that there are no simple solutions.

“We have to be honest with ourselves about this issue. Each time when we confronted it in the past, Chicago only went far enough to clear our consciences so we could move on,” he said. “This time will and must be different.”

Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel says that cell phone video recordings of police officers are interfering with the officers’ ability to do their jobs … and that is why the murder numbers are rising for his city.

Emanuel blamed the higher murder rate on “the chilling effects of high-profile protests against police brutality and officers’ fear of cell phone videos of their actions going viral.”

Last week, at a meeting of elected officials and top law enforcement officials, Emanuel said, “We have allowed our police department to get fetal and it is having a direct consequence.” He then added, “They have pulled back from the ability to interdict … they don’t want to be a news story themselves, they don’t want their career ended early, and it’s having an impact.”

It’s an interesting claim from a mayor whose city was dubbed the “murder capital” of the nation back in 2012, long before the rise of viral police brutality videos and the popularization of the Black Lives Matter movement.

Last month, statistics were released by the FBI showing that Chicago had 411 killings, more than New York’s 333 murders and Los Angeles’ 260 murders. This is despite the fact that Chicago has a smaller population than both of those cities do.

Last week,  Rahm Emanuel joined other big city mayors and police chiefs in Washington, D.C., to discuss the violence plaguing their cities. One of the conclusions they drew is that the increase in violence is partly due to the decrease in policing.

During the discussion in D.C., the many of the leaders, including Emanuel, agreed that part of the problem is the “YouTube effect,” meaning officers are less aggressive now than they were before due to the fear of becoming the star of the next viral video about police abuse.

Emanuel used the word “fetal” to describe these officers.

“We have allowed our police department to get fetal and it is having a direct consequence,” Emanuel told U.S. Attorney General Loretta Lynch at the meeting, according to the Washington Post. “They have pulled back from the ability to interdict … they don’t want to be a news story themselves, they don’t want their career ended early, and it’s having an impact.”

On Monday, Emanuel defended that comment to the Chicago Tribune, saying the events that happened in Ferguson and Baltimore led many officers to back down when they might not have before.

“What happened post-Baltimore, what happened post-Ferguson is having an impact,” Emanuel said. “And I still believe recent events over the last year or 18 months have had an impact. And officers will tell you that. And I tried to speak up for the good officers that are doing community policing that make up the men and women of the Chicago Police Department.”

At last week’s meeting, New York City Police Commissioner William Bratton backed up that thought, saying the perception of police in New York would have been even worse if two of their officers were not killed execution-style in December.

The summit was held following a particularly violent September in Chicago. For two consecutive weeks, more than 50 people were shot. Just a few weeks later, the Daily Beast named Chicago “America’s mass-shooting capital.”