City officials worry violence will beget violence after the public sees how Laquan McDonald died.
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| Laquan McDonald and Jason Van Dyke |
This column was published on Patch in November 2015. This piece was among those recognized by the Chicago Headline Club as a finalist for a Peter Lisagor Award.
By Dennis Robaugh
A video of a police officer firing 16 shots into Laquan McDonald will be shared with the people of Chicago on Wednesday.
The city knows protesters will fill the streets when people see how the 17-year-old South Side teen died in October 2014.
The recording of his death is so horrible, so graphic, so disturbing, say those who’ve seen the bullets strike McDonald, Chicago probably will join the sad company of cities to erupt in violence over the deaths of young black men at the hands of white police officers.
Ja’Mal Green, founder of a South Side youth group, likened McDonald to a “modern-day Emmett Till.” When Mamie Till Mobley opened his coffin so the world could see how white men had destroyed her son in 1955, she galvanized the Civil Rights movement.
Investigators who’ve seen the Laquan McDonald video reportedly were brought to tears. What will happen when the city and the world see the same?
The city of Chicago fought to keep the video under wraps pending the conclusion of a federal investigation, arguing that a public viewing could only be inflammatory. Last week, a judge decided the city must release the recording by Wednesday.
Even with a blanket of snow on the ground, a chill in the air, and a holiday of Thanksgiving on the calendar, Chicago is afraid of what comes next.
One day before the police dash-cam video goes public, however, the officer who fired those shots, 37-year-old Jason Van Dyke, will be arraigned on first-degree murder charges.
Van Dyke shot McDonald from 12 to 15 away as he walked down the middle of Pulaski Street, his back turned toward the police, with a small knife in his hand. McDonald, later found to be under the influence of PCP, was suspected of committing a robbery, and he’d been chased on foot. Police officers were following McDonald warily, hoping eventually to Taser him, when Van Dyke opened fire.
Among the five cops on the scene, Van Dyke was the only officer to shoot, and he kept shooting after McDonald’s body fell to the ground. Van Dyke claims he feared for his life. The city’s own legal counsel confirms McDonald was walking away from the police officer.
The city settled a civil lawsuit with the family for $5 million.
Van Dyke turned himself in Tuesday morning.
Meanwhile, Mayor Rahm Emanuel met with pastors and civic leaders Monday night in the hope of quelling potential violent outbursts in reaction to the video.
Emanuel called the video “hideous” on Monday and a “violation of your conscience.”
“This officer didn’t uphold the law, he took the law into his own hands. Didn’t build the trust that we would want to see, and wasn’t about providing safety and security so at every point he violated what we entrusted him,” Emanuel said.
A police officer since 2001, Van Dyke has primarily served in Chicago’s highest crime neighborhoods. Since 2006, 18 complaints have been filed against him for excessive force and racial slurs, according to the University of Chicago Law School’s Citizen Police Data Project. He was not disciplined in any of these cases, but one led the city to settle with the complainant for $350,000. The case cost the city another $160,000 in legal fees.
The mayor’s meeting with pastors, reportedly, was “very contentious.”
“Protests are imminent,” the Rev. Ira Acree, pastor of the Greater St. John Bible Church on Chicago’s West Side, told DNAinfo. “Mayor Emanuel knows that.”
In his Sunday sermon, Father Michael Pfleger, pastor of St. Sabina Catholic Church, told his congregation to shut down Michigan Avenue on Black Friday, a place traditionally packed with holiday shoppers.
“If you really want to make a statement: Black Friday is coming up. The number one business day,” Pfleger preached. “Don’t shop on Black Friday and go down to Michigan Avenue and sit down in the street and block the street on Michigan Avenue with civil disobedience peacefully, and say ‘business as usual can’t go on while our children are dying.’”
Chicago is a city of the dead, and this culture of death has been brought to life on the big screen.
On Sunday, film director Spike Lee debuted his new movie, “Chi-raq,” at the Chicago Theatre. Starring Chicago’s own Jennifer Hudson and John Cusack, the film portrays the murderous violence that defines entire city neighborhoods. The cast and crew were in the pews on Sunday when Pfleger called for his congregation to shut down the Magnificent Mile in response to the Laquan McDonald video.
For a while, as Lee filmed in Chicago, the city’s elected leaders decried the movie’s title for unfairly likening Chicago to a war zone, blustering about what the movie was called as body after body dropped in the city’s streets.
Just this month, two more dropped in senseless murders. The opportunities for outrage come at a rapid clip in Chicago.
On Nov. 2, a 9-year-old boy, Tyshawn Lee, was lured to an alley and shot to death in what police call a gangland revenge execution. The autopsy shows the 83-pound boy was shot in the head, the hand and the back, and powder burns show he was shot at close range.
A day later, a 20-year-old model from Evanston, Kaylyn Pryor, who grew up in Englewood, was shot dead in the street. Her grandmother could hear the gunfire. Pryor was waiting for a bus. She’d recently won a Mario Tricoci modeling contest, and soon would interview for a new job.
Hundreds of thousands of Chicagoans who live out their days against a backdrop of gunfire experience this city as a war zone.
Truth be told, some officers see these streets as a war zone, too. And maybe that explains why an officer can fire 16 shots into a teen-ager armed with a knife and then claim he justifiably, in his mind, feared for his life.
Hoping to head off a violent reaction to the video, the Cook County state’s attorney’s office reportedly sped up its investigation so the public would know the police officer who took McDonald’s life will face trial.
That may not provide the comfort some would hope for.
In 2012, police officer Dante Servin was off duty in a West Side park when he got into an argument with a group of people and fired his weapon blindly into a crowd. He struck 22-year-old Rekia Boyd in the head as she walked to a nearby store with friends. Servin went on trial but was acquitted, even though the judge said he behaved recklessly.
Until Monday, police superintendent Garry McCarthy had backed Servin, saying he never should have been prosecuted. Late Monday night, news broke that McCarthy would urge the police board to fire Servin for firing the shots that ended Boyd’s life.
The city settled a civil lawsuit with the family for $4.5 million.
McCarthy released a prepared statement late Monday.
“After considerable deliberation, I have come to the conclusion that Officer Dante Servin showed incredibly poor judgement in his efforts to intervene in a low-level dispute while off-duty. His actions tragically resulted in the death of an innocent young woman and an unthinkable loss for a Chicago family and community.
“In the end, CPD has rules that we all must live by. Officer Servin violated those rules and he’s going to be held accountable for that.”
Over the last decade, the city of Chicago has paid out more than $520 million to people who’ve been shot and beaten by Chicago police officers. More than half a billion dollars for officers who did not live by those rules.
Money that could have built new schools, new libraries, fixed roads. Money that could have paid the salaries of teachers, or even peace officers. Money that could have helped to create jobs.
Money that maybe, just maybe, could have been spent to ease the despair that fuels the violence.
Now, after all this payoff money, the city appears to be moving with haste and publicity against officers out of fear at what will come next.
Perhaps it’s too little, too late.
“I’m definitely concerned about people’s outrage,” Pastor Corey Brooks of the New Beginnings Church of Chicago said after meeting with the mayor. His church stands on South King Drive not far from a particularly violent stretch of road popularized in rap lyrics as O Block.
“We’re in a situation that has the potential to be a bombshell.”