Back in October of 2014, Laquon McDonald was shot 16 times by Chicago police officer Jason Van Dyke. There was a fairly hasty $5 million settlement, approved by the city council even before the family filed suit.
I took the title of this diary from a column by John Kass in yesterday’s Chicago Tribune. John Kass is normally a friend of police officers, and not a columnist with whom I normally agree, but he writes directly and clearly about this case.
The judge is set to rule next week on a FOI request for the release of the dashcam video. The mayor and the city are against it, claiming it will be released at the appropriate time, but releasing it right now would compromise the ongoing investigation. The officer is currently on paid desk duty.
Kass writes:
“One man who said he has talked to federal authorities told me on Tuesday he'd been driving his son to the hospital and saw it all. The police union version was that McDonald "lunged" at the officer. The witness's account differs markedly.
"I was there, I saw it," he said. "He (McDonald) wasn't attacking anybody. He was looking for a way out. He was just trying to turn away. The kid turned away, was dropped at the first shot or two, and the police kept shooting and shooting. You could see his body moving.
"It freaked me out. It freaked my son out."
Mr. McDonald had reportedly been slashing tires with a small knife. Initial police reports stated that he lunged at the office with the knife. This is contradicted by witness reports and by the video. Kass says:
“Reading or hearing about 16 shots pumped into the body of a young man isn't the same thing as seeing it.
If the video is released, many won't care about the drugs or the knife. Here's what will be seared on the American mind: the black body flinching with bullet after bullet from a white cop's gun.
I have not seen the video. "It's worse than anything that's come out this summer on police cases anywhere," said a source who has seen it. "He starts walking away from the officers. The first shot, he spins and falls to the ground. Then the officer continues to shoot, and intermittently, you see the body twitching and jerking from the rounds."
Kass manages to take a derisive swipe at activists at the end of the article, but the last paragraph is spot on:
“Keeping the video secret serves the politics of City Hall. Releasing it serves the interests of activists and police critics who will make McDonald a martyr, and perhaps fashion him into a political club to hammer police and the mayor.
But the people deserve to see what happened. And once they see it, then the people can decide what to do about it. It's their city.”
It shames me to say I must have missed this story back when it happened. It was written about in the press and probably here as well. I guess it got lost in all the other police killings. For multiple people to say that this is the worst video they’ve seen of a police shooting, it must be absolutely heartbreaking and tragic. And Kass is right, the people deserve to see it, and to decide what to do about it.
I can only hope that some good comes out of it. A fundamental change in the expectations that people have for the police, and a complete overhaul in how police are trained, investigated, and held responsible for their crimes.
As an end note, I’d like to post a link to the Chicago Police Citizens Data Project, a searchable database of 56,000 complaints against CPD officers between 2001 and the present. A Chicago Reader article chronicles the successful efforts to make this information public.