[News] How Chicago tried to cover up a police execution

[Anti-Imperialist News]

  How Chicago tried to cover up a police execution


          By Curtis Black
          <http://chicagoreporter.com/author/curtis-black/>- November
          25, 2015

*http://chicagoreporter.com/how-chicago-tried-to-cover-up-a-police-execution/?fb_action_ids=10156216441700720&fb_action_types=og.likes*

Laquan-McDonald

Source: Cook County Medical Examiner

It was just about a year ago that a city whistleblower came to 
journalist Jamie Kalven and attorney Craig Futterman out of concern that 
Laquan McDonald’s shooting a few weeks earlier “wasn’t being vigorously 
investigated,” as Kalven recalls. The source told them “that there was a 
video and that it was horrific,” he said.

Without that whistleblower—and without that video—it’s highly unlikely 
that Chicago Police officer Jason Van Dyke would be facing first-degree 
murder charges today.

“When it was first reported it was a typical police shooting story,” 
Kalven said, where police claim self-defense and announce an 
investigation, and “at that point the story disappears.” And, typically, 
a year or 18 months later, the Independent Police Review Authority 
confirms the self-defense claim, and “by then no one remembers the 
initial incident.”

“There are an average of 50 police shootings of civilians every year in 
Chicago, and no one is ever charged,” said Futterman. “Without the 
video, this would have been just one more of 50 such incidents, where 
the police blotter defines the narrative and nothing changes.”

Last December, Kalven and Futterman issued a statement revealing the 
existence of a dash-cam video and _calling for its release_ 
<http://invisible.institute/news/2014/laquan-mcdonald>.  Kalven tracked 
down a witness to the shooting, who said he and other witnesses had been 
“shooed away” from the scene with no statements or contact information 
taken.

In February, _Kalven obtained a copy of McDonald’s autopsy_ 
<http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/politics/2015/02/laquan_mcdonald_shooting_a_recently_obtained_autopsy_report_on_the_dead.html>, 
which contradicted the official story that McDonald had died of a single 
gunshot to the chest. In fact, he’d been shot 16 times—as Van Dyke 
unloaded his service revolver, execution style—while McDonald lay on the 
ground.

The next month, the City Council approved a $5 million settlement with 
McDonald’s family, whose attorneys had obtained the video. They said it 
showed McDonald walking away from police at the time of the shooting, 
contradicting the police story that he was threatening or had “lunged 
at” cops. The settlement included a provision keeping the video 
confidential.

“The real issue here is, this terrible thing happened, how did our 
governmental institutions respond?” Kalven said.  “And from everything 
we’ve learned, compulsively at every level, from the cops on the scene 
to the highest levels of government, they responded by circling the 
wagons and by fabricating a narrative that they knew was completely 
false.”  To him this response is “part of a systemic problem” and 
preserves “the underlying conditions that allow abuse and shield abuse.”

In April, the Chicago Tribune revealed Van Dyke’s name and his _history 
of civilian complaints_ 
<http://my.chicagotribune.com/#section/-1/article/p2p-83383997/>—including 
several brutality complaints, one of which cost the city $500,000 in a 
civil lawsuit—none of which resulted in any disciplinary action. In May, 
Carol Marin reported that _video from a security camera at a Burger King 
on the scene had apparently been deleted by police_ 
<http://www.nbcchicago.com/investigations/laquan-mcdonald-investigation-305105631.html> 
in the hours after the shooting.

“This case shows the operation of the code of silence in the Chicago 
Police Department,” said Futterman. “From the very start you have 
officers and detectives conspiring to cover up the story. The question 
is, why are they not being charged?”

Van Dyke’s history “also shows what happens when the police department 
consistently chooses not to look at patterns of abuse complaints when 
investigating misconduct charges,” he adds. This failure “is one of the 
reasons an officer like Van Dyke has an opportunity to execute a 
17-year-old kid.”

Rather than acknowledging the systemic failures, _Mayor Rahm Emanuel is 
now trying to frame the issue as the action of one bad officer_ 
<http://my.chicagotribune.com/#section/-1/article/p2p-85130451/>, as the 
Tribune reports.  “One individual needs to be held accountable,” he said 
Monday.

Kalven calls Emanuel’s “reframing” of the narrative “essentially false.” 
He points out that “everything we know now, the city knew from Day One. 
They had the officers on the scene. They knew there were witnesses. They 
had the autopsy, they had the video.... They maintained a false 
narrative about those events, and they did it for a year, when it could 
have been corrected almost immediately....They spent a year stonewalling 
any calls for transparency, any information about the case.”

He points to Cincinnati, where last summer a university officer was 
indicted for murder and video from his body camera was released within 
days following the shooting of an unarmed African-American man in a 
traffic stop.

“The policy in Cincinnati is that you should release within 24 hours 
unless there are compelling investigatory reasons to hold on longer,” 
said Kalven.  “The policy should be that the presumption is that this is 
public information and it is released as quickly as can reasonably be 
done, except in cases where there is a genuine and very specific 
investigatory need to withhold it.”

That’s not the same as waiting until an investigation is concluded. 
Friday’s ruling that the McDonald video must be released—and the absence 
of any affidavit from investigators about the need to withhold it—showed 
that “there was absolutely no legal or investigatory impediment to 
releasing this” long ago.

“This was an incredible test of leadership, a major challenge to 
[Emanuel’s] leadership,” Kalven said.  “Think how different the 
situation would be right now if the city had acknowledged the reality of 
what happened in the days or weeks after it happened. That would have 
built confidence.”

And instead of vague and politically self-serving calls for “healing,” 
it could have begun a real process of accountability of the kind 
necessary to start addressing the extreme alienation between police and 
wide segments of our communities.

Instead, with only Van Dyke indicted, it looks like he’s being 
sacrificed in order to protect the system that created him.

-- 
Freedom Archives 522 Valencia Street San Francisco, CA 94110 415 
863.9977 www.freedomarchives.org
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