Top changes in 2 years since release of Laquan McDonald shooting video

With Friday marking the two-year anniversary of the release of dashcam video that showed Chicago Police Officer Jason Van Dyke shooting 17-year-old Laquan McDonald 16 times, there’s much that’s changed.

As the city and its leaders have face a tidal wave of criticism, Chicago has seen and imposed wholesale revisions or reforms to many of its institutions, structures and policies.

A recap:

— Hours before the video was released by order of a Cook County judge, the Cook County State’s Attorney’s Office, then lead by Anita Alvarez, approved first-degree murder charges against Van Dyke. His case marked the first time in Chicago history that an officer was charged with murder for an on-duty shooting. The case is still working its way through the court.

Three other officers who were at the scene of the Oct. 20, 2014 shooting in the 4100 block of South Pulaski were charged with conspiracy, obstruction of justice and official misconduct. Several police supervisors, who deemed the shooting justified, retired. The department’s top brass at the time all saw the video within 48 hours of the shooting, and all deemed it justified.

— The video — which shows Van Dyke firing at McDonald even after he had collapsed in the middle of Pulaski — enraged much of Chicago and sparked days of protests that wove across the city. Marchers called for the resignations of Alvarez, then-CPD Supt. Garry McCarthy and Mayor Rahm Emanuel, all of who were accused of sitting on the video for more than a year for political gain.

One week after the 2015 mayoral election runoff, the City Council approved a $5 million settlement to the McDonald family before a lawsuit was ever filed.

In a speech to the City Council in December 2015, Emanuel cited a “code of silence” within the CPD.

— Saying his police superintendent had become “a distraction,” Emanuel fired McCarthy that same month, installing First Deputy Supt. John Escalante as the interim head of the department.

Emanuel, hoping to ease boiling tensions between police and the City’s black community, tasked the Chicago Police Board with conducting a nationwide search for the CPD’s next superintendent. Ultimately the mayor circumvented the process and tapped Eddie Johnson for the job in March 2016, even though Johnson, then the department’s Chief of Patrol, did not submit his name for the job.

McCarthy has since become a vocal critic of Emanuel and has had his name floated as running for mayor.

— Shortly after the video’s release, the U.S. Department of Justice opened an investigation in the practices of CPD.

In a report released in January 2017, the DOJ found that CPD officers shot at fleeing suspects who weren’t an immediate threat, used force to retaliate against people, failed to address racially discriminatory behavior within the department, and put their own officers at risk.

The report alleged widespread and repeated violations of the Constitution. It slammed the police department for failing to investigate most cases use of force cases and whitewashing the cases it does open. Interviews of officers involved in shootings and other incidents, the DOJ found, were done in a way to get information that helps the officer rather than getting at the truth.

The Justice Department also concluded that Chicago police lack the training and practices to de-escalate volatile situations — which leads to shootings that may have been preventable and puts cops in danger.

— In March 2016, Anita Alvarez lost the Democratic primary for Cook County State’s Attorney to Kim Foxx, a former top aide to Cook County Board President Toni Preckwinkle. Foxx would go on to win the general election in a landslide.

Alvarez remained under fire from the public since the video’s release, and Foxx campaigned largely as a reformer. Last week, Foxx’s office wiped out the convictions of 15 men who were sent to prison by crooked former Chicago cop Ronald Watts.

— The ACLU of Illinois, Black Lives Matter and Illinois Attorney General Lisa Madigan all filed lawsuits aimed at ensuring court oversight of the CPD to ensure reforms.

The CPD has made its own efforts to implement reforms, including a new use-of-force policy that puts emphasis on “the sanctity of life.”

The department is currently in the process of retraining officers in other areas, including officers’ and civilians’ mental health, civil and human rights, pursuits of criminal suspects and court testimony.

Additionally, the CPD is working to hire nearly 1,000 new officers to combat Chicago’s entrenched gun violence. The mayor’s office has touted the diversity among recent cadet classes as a way to re-establish trust with minority communities.

— In August 2016, the city announced plans to abolish the Independent Police Review Authority, the agency charged with investigating police misconduct. The DOJ found that IPRA was largely toothless and ineffective. It’s replacement, the Civilian Office of Police Accountability, would be a more independent civilian agency, according to Emanuel.

— In April 2017, rank-and-file CPD officers elected new union leadership. Kevin Graham ran on a platform that rejected the DOJ’s findings, calling the investigation “politically-motivated” and “part of a larger movement to put the handcuffs on the police in the Obama administration.”

— Last week, Patricia Brown Holmes, the special prosecutor in the Van Dyke case, announced that the grand jury impaneled to investigate the CPD’s handling of the McDonald shooting had been dismissed and no more indictments were coming.In June, Brown had announced a three-count grand jury indictment charging patrol officers Joseph Walsh and Thomas Gaffney and detective David March with conspiracy, obstruction of justice and official misconduct.

Holmes accused the three men of filing false accounts of the October 2014 shooting to keep Van Dyke from being accused of any wrongdoing. She also said the three failed to interview witnesses who might have contradicted their faulty version of events.

Craig Futterman, a University of Chicago Law School professor who was one of the lawyers pressing Chief Criminal Judge LeRoy K. Martin to assign a special prosecutor to probe the CPD’s handling of the McDonald investigation, said the charges against the three officers earlier this year marked the first time police had faced jail time for upholding a “code of silence” to protect other cops. But Futterman was disappointed Holmes didn’t bring charges against high-ranking officers who signed off on false reports.

“There’s no doubt in my mind that the three who were indicted were all culpable and should have been charged,” Futterman said. “To me, it was even more important to go after the brass who signed off on those lies and made those lies the official narrative of the police department.

“[Lower-ranking officers] know that if they go against the official narrative, they would be crushed, their careers would be over.”