The trial for Jason Van Dyke, the Chicago police officer charged in the 2014 murder of Laquan McDonald, is set to begin on September 5, 2018. | Alyssa Schukar for POLITICO Magazine
The day before he fired McCarthy, Emanuel convened a Police Accountability Task Force, which would issue a report recommending training police to eliminate racial bias; establishing a civilian agency to investigate police misconduct; and equipping more police with body cameras. This month, Emanuel also accepted a court-supervised consent decree that will, among other reforms, require police to notify dispatchers every time they point a gun at a suspect. McCarthy is skeptical of the consent decree, charging that it will cause high-ranking officers to spend “less time supervising and more time documenting.” He says he favors body cameras, but that he understands cameras alone can’t build trust between police and citizens. “What we’re missing is the source of the anger and the disenfranchisement in these communities,” McCarthy says, “that 400-year history and the socioeconomic divide that still exists and is widening, certainly in this city.”
McCarthy sees his firing as part of “a witch hunt in the department” that “made it very clear that nobody had the officers’ backs.” He points out that after Eric Garner was choked by a New York police officer in 2014 and died (“the Eric Garner quote-unquote illegal chokehold case,” McCarthy calls it), Mayor Bill de Blasio did not fire Bratton; instead, the police commissioner conducted an internal investigation. “They did not say, ‘We’re going to stop policing the way we’ve been policing,’” McCarthy says. “You don’t change your policies. You don’t reverse course.”
McCarthy’s ultimate goal, if he is elected, is to depoliticize policing in America’s most politicized city—including by formalizing a merit-based promotion system. (In Chicago, sergeants are still named by “merit promotions” that a U.S. Justice Department study called rife with “cronyism” and “clout.”) Politics, McCarthy contends, not only did him in, but is preventing Chicago from bringing murders under control. “It’s not going to change unless someone changes it,” McCarthy says. “You’ve got to hit it with a hammer.”
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While McCarthy presses his case, some of his opponents are criticizing him not just for his role in the McDonald shooting, but for creating a police culture that encouraged harassment—or worse—of minorities.
As in so many political scandals, the cover-up of McDonald’s shooting was almost as damaging as the original offense. In March and April 2015, the city’s counsel negotiated a $5 million settlement with McDonald’s family. The family agreed that the video would remain concealed until the investigation into Van Dyke’s conduct was completed. It was finally made public as a result of a journalist’s lawsuit. At the same time that the city was negotiating with the McDonald family, McCarthy publicly agreed with the official policy that the video should be suppressed until the police and the FBI had completed their investigations. Now, as a mayoral candidate, he disclaims any involvement in keeping it hidden. “The cover-up of that video, or the withholding of that video, did not happen on the criminal side. It happened on the civil side, which was completely outside of my purview,” McCarthy says.
His fellow candidates would beg to differ. If McCarthy makes the runoff, his likeliest opponent would be Toni Preckwinkle, the African-American president of the Cook County Board of Commissioners. After the McDonald video was released, Preckwinkle participated in the Michigan Avenue march and called for McCarthy’s firing. “I think that was appropriate then, and I think it’s appropriate now,” she says. Ja’Mal Green, a 23-year-old police reform activist also running for mayor, similarly maintains that McCarthy, who saw the video two days after the shooting, was part of the cover-up: “If you go along with what someone else is doing to save yourself, then ultimately, you’re conspiring. Garry got on camera every day and said, ‘I stand with Rahm.’”
At a public forum at a popular tavern in 2016, Preckwinkle called the ex-police chief a “racist bully boy” who encouraged “hyperpolicing of black and brown neighborhoods.” Candidate Lori Lightfoot, a former federal prosecutor and police board member who chaired Emanuel’s Police Accountability Task Force, gives McCarthy no credit for reducing Chicago’s murder rate, and similarly describes his broader tactics as a “militarized” approach that “terrorized” minority communities. Under McCarthy, the police department got more aggressive in using “stop and frisk, though the practice was reduced drastically after the ACLU reached a settlement agreement with the police requiring documentation of all police stops, including the citizen’s race. “If you were black anywhere in the city, no matter your gender, no matter your age, his directive was, ‘Stop you,’” Lightfoot charges. “Do we really want a city where we put black and brown cities under house arrest, where we don’t engage in constitutional policing?”
Green, Lightfoot and Preckwinkle have a very different idea of what Chicago’s police force should look like. Green’s proposals include requiring officers to carry misconduct insurance, and an app called Excuse Me, Officer, which citizens could use to rate their interactions with police. Lightfoot believes the city’s abysmal crime statistics—including a 17 percent murder clearance rate—can be turned around only by encouraging economic development in poor communities and building trust between police and the citizenry. She suggests more police training in areas such as technology and procedural injustice, and more engagement between detectives and the community. Preckwinkle has declared her support for the consent decree. At her campaign announcement, she called herself “an outspoken critic concerning policing in the city of Chicago. I won’t apologize for that, nor stop calling out police violence, abuse and lack of accountability that continues to devastate our black and brown communities. In fact, I think understanding that reality is a requirement for the next mayor.”
Preckwinkle is a seasoned, successful politician, an alderman for 19 years, and current chair of the Cook County Democratic Party. She would be a tough runoff opponent for McCarthy. While he would have difficulty expanding his appeal beyond conservative voters, she could add Latinos and liberal lakefront whites to her African-American base. Russ Stewart, a political commentator who writes about the Northwest Side neighborhoods where McCarthy is expected to run well, offered this prediction in his newspaper column: If Preckwinkle and Chuy Garcia, Emanuel’s 2015 opponent, both run for mayor, “they would finish one-two, but only if there is no other black or Hispanic competitor. Otherwise, one of them will face McCarthy in the runoff.“
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The more immediate concern for Chicagoans is the verdict in the Van Dyke trial, which is expected to conclude in the week ahead. If the officer is found “not guilty,” police reform is likely to become an even bigger issue in the mayoral race. Police officers are rarely found guilty of murder for on-duty shootings, though: This year’s conviction of a Dallas officer was only the second in the United States since 2005. Chicago’s activist community is as well organized as any in the country, and its members hope that the city responds with demonstrations, not violence.
“We’ve seen what happened in Ferguson. We’ve seen what happened in Baltimore,” says William Calloway, an anti-police violence activist whose filing of a Freedom of Information Act contributed to the release of the McDonald video. If Van Dyke is acquitted, he says, “I want everybody to come out and shut the city down. Stop traffic. [Chicago Transit Authority] shut down. Educators walk off the job.”
Protesters are already building momentum. On the mid-September morning when opening arguments began in Van Dyke’s trial, a multi-racial group calling themselves the Revolution Club marched in circles in front of the Cook County Criminal Courthouse. “From the slave catchers and the KKK to the killer cops of today,” they chanted. “Convict Van Dyke and throw him in jail. The whole damn system is guilty as hell.” Behind them trailed a man in a bow tie, holding an American flag on whose stripes were written the names of African-Americans killed by police officers: Philando Castile, Eric Garner, Trayvon Martin, Laquan McDonald.
When those protestors dispersed, they were replaced by a lone man who called himself “Brother West Side.” The man carried a diagram of a human body, with each of the 16 bullets that pierced McDonald marked in red. “Justice for Laquan McDonald!” the man shouted through a hand-held public address system. “All he had was a butter knife! They didn’t read him his rights! They could have told him to lay on the ground and hold his hands over his head, ’cause you don’t bring no gun to a knife fight!”
During a break from watching the trial, Calloway said he planned to attend every day, because he considers Van Dyke the epitome of everything that’s wrong with the Chicago Police Department—and believes McCarthy contributed to the aggressive culture in which Van Dyke committed his alleged crime. “[McCarthy] was allowing officers to violate constitutional rights,” Calloway says—“excessive use of force, illegal search and seizure.”
McCarthy won’t comment directly on the trial, except to say this: “Anytime a police officer has to use deadly physical force, let alone force, it’s a tragedy. … The officer is going to have to explain why he did what he did. I mean, that’s the case in any police-related shooting. You have to articulate why you used deadly physical force.”
Regardless of what the jury decides, the 16 shots Van Dyke fired have ended political careers, reshaped the mayor’s race and made police conduct a defining issue in Chicago politics.
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