<html>
<head>
<meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8">
</head>
<body bgcolor="#FFFFFF" text="#000000">
<div id="container" class="container font-size5">
<div style="display: block;" id="reader-header" class="header"><span
class="timestamp "><time datetime="20151201"
itemprop="datePublished" content="2015-12-01">December 1,
2015</time></span>
<h1 itemprop="name">Before Laquan McDonald, a Chicago Police
Shooting with No Video</h1>
<h3>By <span itemscope="" itemprop="author"
itemtype="http://schema.org/Person"><a
href="http://www.newyorker.com/contributors/alex-kotlowitz"
title="Alex Kotlowitz" rel="author" itemprop="url"><span
itemprop="name">Alex Kotlowitz</span></a></span></h3>
<p><b><small><small><small><small><a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/before-laquan-mcdonald-a-chicago-police-shooting-with-no-video">http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/before-laquan-mcdonald-a-chicago-police-shooting-with-no-video</a></small></small></small></small></b><br>
</p>
</div>
<div class="content">
<div style="display: block;" id="moz-reader-content">
<div
xml:base="http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/before-laquan-mcdonald-a-chicago-police-shooting-with-no-video"
id="readability-page-1" class="page">
<div id="articleBody" class="articleBody ad-container "
itemprop="articleBody">
<p data-wc="168" class="descender">There was something
sadly familiar about the video released last week of a
police officer in Chicago shooting a seventeen-year-old,
Laquan McDonald, sixteen times. After the city’s lawyers
viewed the video, earlier this year, they offered
McDonald’s family five million dollars, before the
family had even filed a lawsuit. In the past ten years,
the city has paid five hundred and twenty-one million
dollars in alleged police-misconduct cases, according to
a study by the Better Government Association, a local
non-profit watchdog group. For many, these settlements
are the only acknowledgement that officers might have
acted unprofessionally, or, worse yet, outside of the
law. After the video emerged, last week, I spoke with
one of the many families who have received settlements
from the city. I met Dana Cross while researching a book
on the city’s street violence. “They paid us off,” she
told me. “I just want those police officers off the
street. If they did it to my baby, they’ll do it again.”</p>
<p data-wc="213">On the night of May 31, 2011, Cross had
just returned home from her job at a day-care center. As
she entered her house, in West Pullman, a predominately
African-American, working-class neighborhood on the
city’s South Side, her son, Calvin, who had just turned
nineteen, and his friend Ryan Cornell, who was
seventeen, were headed out to meet some girls at a
nearby bus stop. Calvin and Ryan had met in the Job
Corps, and Cross had agreed to let Ryan live with them
since he came from a fractured family. Her son, she
says, was like a mentor to Ryan. When Calvin got a job
during tax season, he helped Ryan get one, too. (They
dressed up as the Statue of Liberty and handed out
flyers for a local accounting service.) Cross ran a
tight ship. The one time her son got in trouble with the
police—at fifteen, he got picked up for violating
curfew—she made him sit in the police station for three
hours before getting him. She was especially upset with
him because he had told the police that she was out of
town. She insisted that her children attend church with
her. Calvin was a member of the choir and the pastor, a
Chicago firefighter, was his godfather.</p>
<p data-wc="60">After Calvin and Ryan left the house,
Cross put on a full-length housedress and was readying
herself for bed when she heard a fusillade of bullets
from somewhere nearby. A few minutes later, Ryan came to
the front door, out of breath. “They’re shooting at
Jack, they’re shooting at Jack,” he told Cross. Jack was
Calvin’s nickname.</p>
<p data-wc="72">The next morning, Cross identified her
son’s body at the morgue. Both the city’s dailies ran
short, next-day articles which reported that a man had
shot “several” times at three police officers, who fired
back while giving chase. According to the stories, the
police department’s press release stated that when the
suspect abruptly turned toward the officers they shot
again, killing him. Nothing more was written about the
incident.</p>
<p data-wc="255">Here, though, are the facts, as
established by the Chicago police, by the city’s Law
Department and by the Independent Police Review
Authority (I.P.R.A.), a civilian agency established in
2007 to examine police shootings and alleged police
misconduct. Three police officers riding in a marked
squad car came upon Calvin and Ryan walking on the
sidewalk down a side street. All three officers—who
belonged to the department’s Mobile Strike Force unit,
which was deployed to high-crime areas and which has
since been disbanded—were dressed in black uniforms, and
the officer in the back seat had a military-grade
assault rifle strapped to his chest. The officers said
that they saw Calvin fidget with something in his
waistband, leading them to believe he may have been
carrying either drugs or a gun, and so they pulled to
the curb, illuminated the two with a spotlight and
ordered Calvin and Ryan to freeze. One of the officers
yelled at them, Show me your hands. Ryan, who had been
stopped by the police before, remained in place and
displayed his hands. Calvin ran. Two of the officers
later told investigators and testified in depositions
that, as Calvin fled, he pulled a revolver from his
waistband and shot at them over his shoulder. In a
deposition, one officer testified that Calvin shot “more
than three times.” Another recalled that “as I got
closer to him, I saw Calvin Cross reach into his front
waistband and he began to fire his gun … towards my
direction.”</p>
<p data-wc="119">The officers continued shooting as they
chased Calvin across a residential street and into a
vacant lot adjacent to a church. All together, they
fired forty-five rounds of ammunition. One officer fired
the full twenty-eight rounds from his rifle and had
shifted to his Beretta pistol when they found Calvin
lying in some thick brush. The two officers who ran to
the vacant lot said that Calvin, who in all likelihood
was wounded at this point, refused their orders to show
his hands, and so they fired again. Calvin was shot a
total of five times, including what appears to have been
the fatal shot, to his forehead, at the bridge of his
nose. He died on the scene.</p>
<p data-wc="120">When the shooting began, Quinntellbua
Benson, a forty-seven-year-old former long-haul truck
driver who had returned to school to become a computer
specialist, was walking toward his sister’s house, on
the corner. He threw himself to the ground to take
cover. When the gunfire subsided, he rose and went into
his sister’s home. A short while later, he poked his
head out the front door, and he told me that he watched
as a group of police officers responding to the incident
stood by the spot where he had lay on the sidewalk. It
soon became clear that they had found a gun there,
though Benson was perplexed, he told me, since Calvin
hadn’t run anywhere near him.</p>
<p data-wc="115">According to the investigations by both
the Chicago police and I.P.R.A., the recovered gun was a
Smith & Wesson revolver, so old and clogged with
“dirt and grime” that a State Police examination
determined that it was inoperable. It had been
manufactured in 1919. Moreover, all six bullets were
still in the chamber. Investigators found no gun residue
on Cross’s hands and no fingerprints on the gun. So, the
natural question is: How could Calvin Cross have shot at
the police?</p>
<p data-wc="115"> Nonetheless, the I.P.R.A. concluded that
two of the officers “reported seeing Mr. Cross pointing
and firing his weapon at the officers.” Yet the evidence
points to something different.</p>
<p data-wc="313">In recent months, Chicago has experienced
a confluence of events amounting to the perfect storm of
questions surrounding police accountability. In May, the
City Council approved a $5.5 million reparations package
for many of the some one hundred men, most of them
African-American from the city’s South Side, who were
tortured—electric shocks, beatings, smotherings with
typewriter covers, and simulated Russian roulette—by the
police commander Jon Burge. For many years, the city
denied the torture, which took place between 1972 and
1991. In addition to compensation, the package included
a commitment to build a memorial to the victims and a
directive to teach all eighth- and tenth-grade students
in the Chicago Public Schools about the Burge case. In
July, Lorenzo Davis, a former investigator for the
I.P.R.A., publicly claimed that he was fired because he
refused to change investigation findings that determined
a police shooting to be unjustified. Davis, who is now
suing the agency for wrongful termination, had
previously served in the Chicago Police Department for
twenty-three years, several of them as a commander.
I.P.R.A. has publicly denied Davis’s allegations. Last
month, after winning a lawsuit against the city, a
journalist, Jamie Kalven, and a lawyer, Craig Futterman,
launched a Web site, <a
href="http://cpdb.co/data/br2qmb/citizens-police-data-project"
data-smart-underline-link-background-position="92"
data-smart-underline-link-color="rgb(0, 0, 0)"
data-smart-underline-link-always="">The Citizens
Police Data Project</a>, that found, among other
things, that twenty-eight thousand five hundred citizen
complaints were filed from 2011 to 2015, but only three
per cent resulted in officers being disciplined. Last
week, a year after a policeman shot Laquan McDonald, the
States Attorney charged the officer with murder. Later
the same day, the city, under a court order, released
the video of the shooting. And next week begins the
much-anticipated trial of a decorated police commander,
Glenn Evans, who allegedly chased a suspect into a
building and shoved a loaded gun in his mouth,
threatening to kill him. It has exhausted a city.</p>
<p data-wc="54">In the case of Calvin Cross, the I.P.R.A.
ruled, two-and-a-half years after the incident, that
“the use of deadly force by Officers Mohammed Ali,
Macario Chavez, and Matilde Ocampo was in compliance
with Chicago Police Department policy.” The officers
were not disciplined. I.P.R.A. declined comment on the
case.</p>
<p data-wc="132">When Calvin Cross was killed, his
girlfriend was pregnant with their child, and so when
the city settled the lawsuit brought by his family, it
agreed to place the money in a trust fund for Calvin’s
son. This past June, the City Council approved a
settlement of two million dollars. In response to
questions about the case, a spokesperson for the city’s
Law Department e-mailed a tellingly direct response:
“Testing of the weapon at issue showed that it had not
been fired and, in fact, was inoperable. Also, no
fingerprints were retrieved from the gun that could be
traced to Mr. Cross. Those factors led to our decision
to settle the case.” The case had been referred to the
States Attorney’s office for review. No charges were
ever filed.</p>
<p data-wc="42">In the wake of the release of the Laquan
McDonald video, Dana Cross, an ordinarily calm woman,
seemed agitated. She told me, “I’m feeling that there
are more cases. I’m wondering, Why did <br>
</p>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
<div> </div>
</div>
<div class="moz-signature">-- <br>
Freedom Archives
522 Valencia Street
San Francisco, CA 94110
415 863.9977
<a class="moz-txt-link-abbreviated" href="http://www.freedomarchives.org">www.freedomarchives.org</a>
</div>
</body>
</html>