BIG BLACK MARK ON LAW ENFORCEMRNT

Police officer Jason Van Dyke gets charged with first-degree murder in a case the Chicago Police Department and City Hall covered up

Lately I’ve been accused of cop bashing, especially in the case of South Boston, Virginia police Cpl. Tiffany Bratton who repeatedly tased a shackled prisoner who then died in the back of a police car. It pains me to be slammed for bashing cops since I try to defend them whenever possible. But, I will not defend bad policing and if that constitutes bashing, so be it.

We now have a year-old case in Chicago that deserves bashing not only of one cop, but of a whole group of cops, including higher-ups, way higher-up. It involves the killing of a black teenager armed with a knife who was shot 16 times by Jason Van Dyke, a white cop with 20 prior citizen complaints of police misconduct.

The police dash cam video of that shooting has only just now been released. It shows 17-year-old Laquan McDonald walking around when Van Dyke gets out of his cop car and opens fire on the teenager. I’ve watched that video about a dozen times and see no evidence that McDonald rushed at the officers. Worse yet, McDonald appeared to be about ten feet from any cops when Van Dyke emptied his pistol at the teenager.

That looks like cold blooded murder to me, and in fact, Van Dyke has now – 13 months after the shooting – been arrested and charged with first-degree murder. His attorney argues that Van Dyke was in fear of his life, but that just doesn’t fly when one looks at the video.

There are two especially serious problems with this case. To begin with, the police reports of the shooting were a pack of lies intended to protect Van Dyke. Higher-ups had to know the reports were not true, but they conspired with the cops on the scene to cover up this obvious murder. The question now is, how high up in the Chicago PD did this cover-up go?

City Hall even went along with the cover up by paying McDonald's family $5 million in hush money. The only reason they paid the family anything is because Mayor Rahm Emanuel and his city hall cohorts must have been very well aware of the true facts in this case and paid off the McDonald family as part of the cover up.

The other problem is the number of citizen complaints that had been lodged against Van Dyke with no disciplinary action ever taken against him. One of those complaints even cost the city $500,000 in a civil lawsuit. While some of those complaints may very well have been bogus, the sheer number of complaints should have told higher-ups that they had a loose cannon within the Chicago PD. The failure to discipline Van Dyke most certainly contributed to the death of Laquan McDonald.

Even though most law enforcement agencies try to weed out unfit applicants through extensive background checks and psychological screenings, too many cops are hired that are not fit to wear the uniform of a police officer. There has got to be a better way to prevent the hiring of loose cannons like Jason Van Dyke.

With the falsification of police reports and the hiding of the dash cam video, it would seem to me that a lot more arrests are in order in this tragic case that columnist Curtis Black calls a police execution.

HOW CHICAGO TRIED TO COVER UP A POLICE EXECUTION

By Curtis Black

The Chicago Reporter
November 24, 2015

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. 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, 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—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 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, 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.