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<h1 class="entry-title" itemprop="headline">How Chicago tried to
cover up a police execution</h1>
<h5 class="byline"><span class="by-author"><span class="by">By</span>
<span class="author vcard" itemprop="author"><a class="url fn
n" href="http://chicagoreporter.com/author/curtis-black/"
title="Read All Posts By Curtis Black" rel="author">Curtis
Black</a></span></span><span class="sep"> - November 25,
2015</span></h5>
<p><b><small><small><small><small><small><a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://chicagoreporter.com/how-chicago-tried-to-cover-up-a-police-execution/?fb_action_ids=10156216441700720&fb_action_types=og.likes">http://chicagoreporter.com/how-chicago-tried-to-cover-up-a-police-execution/?fb_action_ids=10156216441700720&fb_action_types=og.likes</a></small></small></small></small></small></b><br>
</p>
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<div class="hero is-image "> <img
src="cid:part2.05050203.08020105@freedomarchives.org"
class="attachment-full wp-post-image" alt="Laquan-McDonald"
height="601" width="901">
<p class="wp-media-credit">Source: Cook County Medical Examiner</p>
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<div class="entry-content clearfix" itemprop="articleBody">
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>“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.”</p>
<p>“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.”</p>
<p>Last December, Kalven and Futterman issued a statement
revealing the existence of a dash-cam video and <a
href="http://invisible.institute/news/2014/laquan-mcdonald"><u>calling
for its release</u></a>. 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.</p>
<p>In February, <a
href="http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/politics/2015/02/laquan_mcdonald_shooting_a_recently_obtained_autopsy_report_on_the_dead.html"><u>Kalven
obtained a copy of McDonald’s autopsy</u></a>, 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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>“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.”</p>
<p>In April, the Chicago Tribune revealed Van Dyke’s name and his
<a
href="http://my.chicagotribune.com/#section/-1/article/p2p-83383997/"><u>history
of civilian complaints</u></a>—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 <a
href="http://www.nbcchicago.com/investigations/laquan-mcdonald-investigation-305105631.html"><u>video
from a security camera at a Burger King on the scene had
apparently been deleted by police</u></a> in the hours after
the shooting.</p>
<p>“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?”</p>
<p>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.”</p>
<p>Rather than acknowledging the systemic failures, <a
href="http://my.chicagotribune.com/#section/-1/article/p2p-85130451/"><u>Mayor
Rahm Emanuel is now trying to frame the issue as the action
of one bad officer</u></a>, as the Tribune reports. “One
individual needs to be held accountable,” he said Monday.</p>
<p>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.”</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>“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.”</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>“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.”</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>Instead, with only Van Dyke indicted, it looks like he’s being
sacrificed in order to protect the system that created him.</p>
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