Police videos: A step toward truth
Investigators looking into Saturday’s fatal police shooting in the South Shore neighborhood will have “tons” of video to review, Chicago police Superintendent Eddie Johnson says. It will likely take months for the Civilian Office of Police Accountability to determine whether the shooting was justified.
But Johnson took the unusual step of releasing a video clip — less than half a minute long — within 24 hours after the shooting. He hoped it would calm protesters by answering the key question of whether Harith Augustus was armed. On Monday, COPA promised to release the rest “at the earliest point.”
The 20-second video, taken by an officer’s body camera, shows what looks like a holstered weapon as police approach Augustus. It appears to show his hand moving toward his waistband as he tries to pull away. There’s no audio and the video doesn’t answer critical questions about how the encounter unfolded.
But its quick release is important because not long ago, the public couldn’t count on seeing any of the video.
That changed when a judge ordered City Hall to turn over video of Officer Jason Van Dyke emptying his gun into black teenager Laquan McDonald in October 2014. On the video, McDonald doesn’t appear to pose a threat to Van Dyke or to seven other officers at the scene who did not fire their guns.
For more than a year, city attorneys had insisted they couldn’t release the video because the case was still under investigation. But a lawsuit shook it loose, and suddenly the investigation was wrapped up with a firstdegree murder charge filed the same day.
Within weeks of the McDonald shooting, the city announced a new policy: Audio and video recordings of police encounters involving deadly force are now made public within 90 days.
The Illinois Freedom of Information Act generally requires public bodies to respond to records requests sooner than that.
The new policy has meant that the city’s default is to release records instead of forcing citizens to go to court to get them, but what’s to stop the city from backsliding on its new policy?
What we’ve learned from viewing those videos is that the evidence they capture is rarely conclusive or no help at all.
Two weeks after the McDonald footage was released, the city dropped its fight to withhold video of the fatal shooting of Ronald Johnson III, 25, in October 2014. A few weeks later, the city released video of the foot chase that led to the shooting of 17-year-old Cedrick Chatman. Those scenes were disturbing, but not definitive by themselves. Both officers were cleared.
In July 2016, Johnson stripped three officers of their police powers within 48 hours after Paul O’Neal, 18, was fatally shot. Video made public a week later showed two officers firing at a stolen Jaguar as it sped away down a residential street. But cameras did not capture O’Neal’s shooting as he attempted to escape on foot. Disciplinary proceedings against the officers are pending.
The 20-second snippet of video doesn’t tell the whole story of what happened between police and Harith Augustus, but its speedy release provides a measure of assurance that we’ll get that story eventually.