CHICAGO — The shooting of Laquan McDonald triggered a momentous police reform effort that spawned a scathing Justice Department report and an extensive consent decree and for the first time added community members directly into Chicago police oversight.
But more than seven years later, the pace of reforms remains slow, stymied by a resistant department, an antagonistic police union and leadership that has fielded criticism for checking boxes rather than pursuing meaningful reform, critics say — all while the city is still notoriously violent and still seeing police misconduct cases.
McDonald’s killer, former Chicago police Officer Jason Van Dyke, was tried and convicted and has nearly finished serving his sentence. But as the city awaits his release from prison Thursday, it reckons with a police department that while changed in some ways, is struggling with many of the same problems that contributed to the teen’s 2014 killing and the response to it.
When the video of McDonald’s death became public, residents saw how the Police Department’s official narrative vastly differed from the events that unfolded on their screens.
And despite efforts on reform, evidence of problem policing is still present. A multimillion-dollar settlement is in the works for Anjanette Young, a woman who was forced into handcuffs while undressed as police raided her home based on a bad tip. An inspector general’s investigation found “a troubling series of unfounded statements” on the raid were made by Mayor Lori Lightfoot’s administration.
The video led to the police superintendent’s dismissal and highlighted how Chicago police officers handle officer shootings and citizen complaints, especially when they involve Black and brown residents.
Craig Futterman, a police accountability expert and law professor at the University of Chicago, pointed to some “imperfect but significant changes” in policing in the years since McDonald’s killing, mostly due to the consent decree and lawsuits that have forced CPD to make changes. Still, the department is largely unwilling to alter its course and submit to public scrutiny, Futterman said, a failing that continues to hold it back even as it works to meet reform deadlines.
“The Chicago Police Department remains resistant to change in its orientation and actually actively fights change,” Futterman said.
A troubling narrative
The initial news reports of the McDonald shooting on Oct. 20, 2014, repeated a narrative put out by the Police Department and the police union: A 17-year-old Black teen had a knife, he refused to put it down, stabbed a squad car’s tire and lunged at an officer.
“He’s got a 100-yard stare. He’s staring blankly,” Pat Camden, who was then a spokesman for the Fraternal Order of Police, told the Chicago Tribune immediately after the shooting. “(He) walked up to a car and stabbed the tire of the car and kept walking.”
Officers were forced to defend themselves, Camden said.
The city initially declined to make video of the shooting public, doing so only after a request by journalist Brandon Smith led to a court challenge and judge’s order for the city to release it.
The video showed that the police narrative was flawed. Images captured the teen moving away from officers before Van Dyke shot him 16 times, including when he had already fallen to the ground.
On Nov. 24, 2015, Van Dyke was charged with first-degree murder. Protesters marched in the Loop the next day.
Later, the Tribune found through a request of 3,000 pages of emails that then-Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s aides knew about the video nearly a year before it was publicly released, raising questions about when the mayor and police leadership realized the exposure the case represented.
Political fallout
Emanuel declined to run for reelection in the wake of the scandal, making his announcement as Van Dyke was about to go to trial. He opposed federal intervention, saying Chicago could handle the problem on its own.
One of his first proposals was to increase the number of officers wearing body cameras. And on the same day that Emanuel fired then-police Superintendent Garry McCarthy, he created the Police Accountability Task Force, which was chaired by Lightfoot, who was also the president of the Chicago Police Board.
The task force’s first report said that the Chicago Police Department must acknowledge its racist history and overhaul its handling of excessive force allegations before true reforms could take place. It recommended abolishing the Independent Police Review Authority, which investigated allegations of officer misconduct, and implementing a citywide reconciliation process.
The Civilian Office of Police Accountability was created after the elimination of IPRA, though experts have pointed to flaws there too.
Futterman said the city should bolster the resources and independence of COPA so the police oversight agency can conduct more meaningful investigations. Investigators should be allowed access to officers after shootings without a waiting period, he said, and videos should be released within 24 to 48 hours as a matter of course.
Emanuel’s task force also recommended creating a community safety oversight committee, which became the Community Commission for Public Safety and Accountability, expected to begin this year.
The community commission came out of the long work done by the Grassroots Alliance for Police Accountability, or GAPA, and Mecole Jordan-McBride, who worked in advocacy and community organizing, was selected as the coordinator. GAPA was made up of many community organizations across Chicago.
Jordan-McBride said that when she initially saw the video it was “a shocker” and “provoked a lot of emotions,” but it was a reminder of what communities of color, specifically Black community members, have been saying for a long time about police misconduct.
“We all know that historically community members’ stories, and particularly, a young Black man ... their stories aren’t always taken as truth,” she said. “And so, for this case, in particular, the story that was told versus the reality of what happened was so drastically different.”
Jordan-McBride said GAPA put out a report after having 19 community conversations on the North, West and South sides of the city over a six-week period. She said the community’s reactions were a pendulum swing from one end to the other, but there was a revelation that there needed to be a change in how officers interacted with community members, how they were trained and the level of support they received, and to have the department’s demographics better reflect the city.
Although the city was slow to create the community commission itself, Jordan-McBride said, she said she hopes that city leaders will now give the commission every opportunity available to thrive.
“I’m grateful that it passed, but still, we have to do things a little bit quicker in Chicago to actually see gains while within some people’s lives,” she said.
Doubts remain
Despite Emanuel’s initial opposition to outside input, he changed course, offering support for a federal investigation, which began in late 2015.
Calls for federal oversight of the Chicago Police Department began nearly immediately after a judge forced the city to release the McDonald video, with then-presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, U.S. Sen. Dick Durbin and Illinois Attorney General Lisa Madigan among politicians clamoring for a Justice Department investigation.
Two years later, the Justice Department released a scathing 164-page report, detailing a broken police department plagued by a lack of accountability for officers, a pervasive code of silence and disproportionate use of force against the city’s Black and Latino residents. The report not only found that police officers used force almost 10 times more often against Black citizens than white, but also that the department failed to responsibly investigate such instances.
“CPD does not give its officers the training they need to do their jobs safely, effectively and lawfully,” then-U.S. Attorney General Loretta Lynch said when the 2017 report was released. “It fails to properly collect and analyze data, including data on misconduct complaints and training deficiencies, and it does not adequately review use-of-force incidents to determine whether force was appropriate or lawful or whether the use of force could’ve been avoided altogether.”
Emanuel agreed to enter into a court-enforced agreement with the Justice Department to enact wide-ranging reforms to how the department trains its officers, keeps data and holds members accountable. U.S. District Judge Robert Dow Jr. in 2019 approved the consent decree, which mandates reforms in training, use of force, data management and transparency, community interactions, officer wellness and other areas.
It generally takes years for cities to come into full compliance with consent decrees. But the Police Department has struggled with missed deadlines and sluggish compliance, and it has faced criticism from high-ranking employees about their strategies for meeting the consent decrees requirements.
Futterman, though, noted that CPD has made some progress, mostly in response to consent-decree mandates and lawsuits. It created new training requirements that focus on de-escalation, he said, and retooled its use-of-force policies. It is also in the process of overhauling its First Amendment policies, he said, in part due to lawsuits that stemmed from police treatment of protesters in 2020.
Chicago police Superintendent David Brown has said the department is more quickly reaching reform goals set in the consent decree after a slower start.
“I don’t think it’s a small thing that we achieved 52% compliance,” Brown has told the Tribune, referring to the percentage of consent decree goals that the department preliminarily met. “This is significant, although we have much much more work to do to be where we want to be.”
Recent reports from Maggie Hickey, the independent monitor overseeing the consent decree, have highlighted some areas of improvement. The department made progress in developing a hate-crimes policy and finalized a policy on interactions with transgender, intersex and gender-nonconforming people, a recent report said. CPD is also now delivering refresher training for its Crisis Intervention Team, which responds to calls for people in a mental-health crisis.
But experts have criticized the pace and substance of the reforms.
Cara Hendrickson, executive director of BPI Chicago, a nonprofit law and policy center, said the department’s overall pace in complying with the consent decree has been slow. Hendrickson negotiated the consent decree when she worked for the Illinois attorney general.
“Progress on the consent decree should proceed at a pace as if lives depend on the success of consent decree,” she said. “This is critical for the safety of our city.”
‘Changing the direction of a steam liner’
A prominent criticism from those who evaluate CPD’s reform progress is one of culture. Less tangible than data about whether the department is meeting assigned mandates is buy-in from its leadership and the rank and file.
“I think the department continues to wrestle with its willingness to make the fundamental structural changes that would be required to see the kind of fundamental change that communities have been demanding for decades,” Hendrickson said. “We’re still waiting to see that kind of change in the department.”
CPD’s culture problems have been blasted by former employees, who have said the leadership is more concerned with headlines than substantive reform.
A former civilian commander who worked on reform efforts resigned last year, writing to Mayor Lightfoot that the department’s leaders were unable “to even feign interest in pursuing reform in a meaningful manner has made it impossible for me to remain involved.” Susan Lee, a former public safety adviser to the mayor, similarly raised concerns about the department’s ability to “keep moving the ball forward” as she resigned.
Hickey, the independent monitor, has recently echoed those concerns.
“I do think the policies are being reformed and that is maybe working a little quicker than the culture being reformed,” Hickey said in a Q&A in November. “I’m not going away anytime soon, unfortunately.”
Futterman, who with activist Will Calloway pushed for the release of the dashcam video that captured McDonald’s shooting, said he questioned whether the city had learned lessons from the McDonald cover-up, when officials fought the release of video of the shooting. He pointed to the similar circumstances of the botched raid at the home of Young.
Lightfoot fought release of the video, which was eventually broadcast by CBS-2.
“We’ve seen some real backsliding,” Futterman said.
Hendrickson said the pending release of Van Dyke underscores the need for a much more robust system of accountability within CPD for police misconduct. The former officer is expected to leave prison Thursday.
She noted that the department’s most recent consent-decree progress report showed that CPD was only in compliance with about 8% of its accountability provisions.
“The lack of accountability was a critical finding of the U.S. Department of Justice when it issued its report,” Hendrickson said. “And it is the area in which CPD is perhaps the most behind in its progress in the consent decree.”
Mecole Jordan-McBride said the biggest thing is that the city needs a cultural change.
“We’ve had a culture that has created very strained at best relationships, particularly in communities of color,” she said. “ ... Do I think that we’re probably on the cusp of cultural change? I will say yes. Would I say that we are light years from where we were six years ago? I would definitely say no, but I think that that’s also very indicative of what change looks like when you’re shifting something as big as the Police Department. It’s like changing the direction of a steam liner.”
Sheila Bedi, a Northwestern University law professor and an attorney involved in the litigation over the decree, said the video of McDonald was devastating because of not only the “act of brutal violence that was caught on tape” but also because it became public how many people from the Police Department were involved in lying about the shooting, showing “a deep intentional cover-up at the highest levels” and a lack of accountability.
Communities have been organizing around racialized police violence in Chicago for generations but there are these flashpoints of police violence that are caught on video, like the 2020 murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis by a white police officer, Bedi said. Those flashpoints can create momentum and outcry for change.
Bedi said it’s a foundational issue that the culture of the Police Department still includes racism and violence, which was seen during CPD’s response to uprising after Floyd’s killing. Since the release of the McDonald dashcam video, Bedi said, a number of officers have been caught on video engaging in violations of CPD policy who have escaped any kind of accountability.
“I think the fact that Jason Van Dyke is being released from prison, it’s a reminder that the work of transforming policing in the city of Chicago is far from done,” Bedi said.
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