Next up in the Laquan McDonald story: Cogs in the machine go on trial
Strictly speaking, the recently concluded trial of Chicago police Officer Jason Van Dyke concerned what happened over roughly six seconds — the time from when Van Dyke exited the police SUV in which he was riding on the night of Oct. 20, 2014, to the time he opened fire on Laquan McDonald, killing him.
No one can deny the symbolic importance of the trial and of the convictions — jurors found Van Dyke, who is white, guilty of second-degree murder and 16 counts of aggravated battery with a firearm. The nation was watching along with concerned Chicagoans to see if the justice system would hold a police officer accountable for what the dashcam video suggested was a gratuitous execution of McDonald, 17 and black, and the relief in many quarters was palpable.
But it was a narrow issue, as small, really, as that six-second window. Van Dyke was one cop who, in the heat of a moment, for reasons that are not clear, made an unjustifiable and tragic decision to use deadly force on one young man who was attempting to walk past him and avoid arrest.
The upcoming conspiracy trial of three other members of law enforcement — former Detective David March, ex-Officer Joseph Walsh and Officer Thomas Gaffney — will pull back and focus on what happened in the six hours following the shooting:
How was it that the reports from police on the scene, including Van Dyke, all ended up supporting Van Dyke’s contention that he shot to defend his life against an attacker, a contention that the dashcam video later revealed to be false?
I’m taking some artistic license here by invoking a window of six hours, but you get the idea. The next trial, set to begin Nov. 26, will examine how it all went down after the shooting that night and into the early morning — how did the brazenly phony stories become the department’s official narrative?
It’s a more important question, really, than what was in Van Dyke’s mind for six seconds, because it suggests a bigger problem than poor training, inadequate psychological screening or whatever else contributed to his rash decision to shoot.
I got to thinking about this Tuesday evening while listening to independent Chicago journalist Jamie Kalven being interviewed on stage at the Logan Auditorium during a live recording of the “Intercepted” podcast. Kalven’s 2015 article, “16 Shots,” in Slate thrust the McDonald story into the spotlight even before the release of the dashcam video, and he’s since produced a documentary film on the case.
“It wasn’t a cover-up in the conventional, Nixonian sense of co-conspirators who knew they did something wrong and then compounded the wrong by suppressing information about it,” Kalven told host Jeremy Scahill. “I wish it was. That, to me, is a sentimental narrative.”
Instead, Kalven said, the shooting caused a certain “machinery” to kick into gear in the department, machinery that operates with near-ritual precision after a shooting, machinery in which each gear and sprocket knows what do without even being told.
Officers on the scene shooed away two civilian witnesses to the shooting — Jose and Xavier Torres. A third civilian witness, Alma Benitez, has alleged in a lawsuit that police took her to a station house and pressured her to change her account and say that McDonald had lunged at police, even going so far as to tell her they had video to support that version of events.
Other officers went to a nearby Burger King and commandeered the surveillance video system. “And, lo and behold, the relevant minutes disappeared from” the video record, Kalven noted dryly.
The formal accounts of officers who witnessed the shooting all ended up aligning with the same false narrative that a Fraternal Order of Police spokesman fed the media on the scene that night.
“This is the machinery that makes black lives disappear,” Kalven said. “It had worked countless times before. They had every reason to expect it would work this time.”
March, now retired, was the lead detective in the investigations into the shooting. He obtained accounts from the officers on the scene and submitted a report contending the dashcam video was “consistent with the accounts of all of the witnesses” who exonerated Van Dyke of wrongdoing.
Walsh, also retired, was Van Dyke’s partner that night and has consistently stuck to the story that, no matter what the video may tell you, McDonald was threatening Van Dyke’s life and needed to be shot. He testified as much, under a grant of limited immunity, at Van Dyke’s trial.
Gaffney, who was one of the first officers to respond to reports that McDonald had been breaking into trucks in the area, is charged with filing false reports of McDonald’s actions in order to shield Van Dyke from prosecution or blame.
They are allegedly cogs in the machinery into which prosecutors hope to throw a wrench. But, oddly, they aren’t the only cogs, nor are they the biggest ones.
What the upcoming trial seems unlikely to address is what happened in the six months that followed the six hours that followed the six seconds.
About 10 days after the shooting, command-level officers gathered at police headquarters to review the video, according to a confidential report by the city inspector general’s office obtained by my Tribune colleagues in late 2016.
They looked at the images. They looked at the reports. They shrugged their shoulders and said, in effect, “Looks good to us.”
The inspector general’s report recommended firing 11 members of the department and disciplining others for misconduct. It remains unclear why the special grand jury impaneled in October 2016 indicted these three and only these three in the cover-up when it so clearly reached to far higher levels of authority and responsibility in the department.
Whatever scheme these defendants were or were not a part of, they didn’t act — they couldn’t have acted — alone.
Assessing their accountability in court is the next step. But it shouldn’t be the last step.
Re: Tweets
The winner of this week’s online reader poll for funniest tweet is political commentator David Frum of The Atlantic. His offering, equal parts dark, amusing and timely, reflects on the alarming report issued Monday by the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which predicted horrific environmental consequences by 2040 if the nations of the world don’t take strong measures against global warming.
Quipped Frum, “If you eat right, refrain from smoking, and wear a seatbelt consistently, you’ll likely live long enough to see the Earth ravaged by climate catastrophe.”
Ha-ha.