Race central to Chicago case, even if jury doesn’t hear it

CHICAGO — In front of jurors in the trial of a white Chicago police officer charged with murder in the shooting of a black teenager, race is hardly mentioned at all.

Just once, during opening statements, have prosecutors even brought up the fact that 17-year-old Laquan McDonald was black, drawing a sharp rebuke from a defense attorney for Officer Jason Van Dyke. Yet the trial is being watched closely in Chicago and around the country as another chapter in a long national story about race and law enforcement.

“At this point we have no precedent that says an African-American can get justice in this country when they are shot down in cold blood by a police officer,” the Rev. Marvin Hunter, McDonald’s great uncle, told reporters this week, trying to put the case in historical context. “From the days of Jim Crow until today we have never gotten justice for anything that has happened to us as African-Americans … by rogue and unjust police officers.”

The issue of race permeates the case — from concerns that releasing video of the shooting would ignite racial tensions in a city with a long history of troubled police relationships with minority communities, to protests after it was finally made public, to allegations during jury selection that Van Dyke’s attorneys were trying to keep blacks from sitting on the panel, to concerns about possible unrest if Van Dyke is acquitted.

The shooting of McDonald happened Oct. 20, 2014, just a few months after a white officer shot 18-year-old Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, leading to months of sometimes-violent protests. In April 2015, the same month Freddie Gray died in police custody in Baltimore, touching off protests there, Chicago was agreeing to pay $5 million to McDonald’s family for his death.

It would be seven more months before the release of squad car video that would appear to contradict officers’ accounts that McDonald had lunged at police with a small knife he had in his right hand. Even before its release, rumors swirled that the video would lead to unrest in a city where the names Fred Hampton and Mark Clark, two Illinois Black Panther Party leaders killed in a 1969 police raid, still resonate in the black community.