A 'Kill-and-Cover-Up' Police Culture?
Witnesses to the shooting told Jamie Kalven, an independent journalist and human rights activist whose nonprofit called the Invisible Institute filed a FOIA request to have the dashcam video released, that police tried to shoo witnesses away from the scene after the shooting instead of collecting names and other information.
And why, many wonder, did the mayor persuade the City Council to authorize a $5 million settlement for McDonald's family, which had not filed a lawsuit. Emanuel claimed a desire to avoid jeopardizing the case. But Chicagoans with long memories -- like me -- wonder whether the cash is reparations or a form of hush money.
The city fought to conceal the video, even after the Wall Street Journal, the Chicago Tribune and a freelance journalist all filed FOIA requests for its release.
To Kalven, the most important issue here is not just the shooting but how governmental institutions -- from the police to the mayor's office -- responded to it, he says.
"And at every level," he told me in a telephone interview, "we can see they responded by circling the wagons and creating a narrative that they knew was completely false."
Kalven's institute worked seven years to open up police files and establish an online database of misconduct complaints against police officers -- 97 percent of which resulted in absolutely no disciplinary action.
Among other issues, Chicago and other cities will have to determine, like the rest of us, how to adjust to the new video age, an age that exposes so much to public view that used to be swept under various rugs.
The McDonald video reveals the flipside of the so-called "Ferguson effect," a widely alleged tendency by some police to hesitate before responding to crime scenes for fear of getting caught in a career-ending cellphone video. If fear of video can prevent atrocities like that revealed in the McDonald case, that's not a bad thing.
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(E-mail Clarence Page at cpage@tribune.com.)
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