new documentary that just premiered on Showtime. The film is called 16 Shots. It examines the 2014 murder of African-American teenager Laquan McDonald in Chicago.
Rick Rowley talking:
We show the moment that every single actor along this process kind of steps in, from the beat cops who initially respond. The first thing they do is they erase—it seems very clear, they destroy evidence. They erase this surveillance video that’s from a Burger King that’s across the street. Eighty minutes are just erased off the machine. They shoo away witnesses. They take some civilian witnesses back to City Hall. And those witnesses described to us—you know, for the first time on camera, in this film, they described being threatened by officers and being coerced into trying to say that they didn’t see what they saw.
Then, you know, immediately what happens is the spokesman for the Fraternal Order of Police, the police union in Chicago, comes out, and he creates the first version of this story. And that’s the story that goes out to the press everywhere. You know, and that is almost always the first and last story. I mean, there are 30 to 60 police shootings a year in Chicago, every week or every other week. You know, in the course of my lifetime, that’s thousands of people who have been shot. And the cases all end in the same way: a small like note in the end of the press, and then we turn the page.
They demand access to the surveillance system. They don’t have a warrant. They don’t have any legal rights to go in and seize the equipment, but they do anyway. They get the night manager to give them the password in there. We can see them on the surveillance footage, you know, messing around with the computer system. And the next day, 87 minutes, from all of the cameras, is just missing. And we know—you know, we actually did a bunch of research. We contacted the engineers who install these systems. And this just doesn’t ever happen. Not only is it missing, but there’s multiple redundant backups on that machine that are all also missing. So, you know, it seems evident that the officers on the scene there erased that footage and just made it disappear.
Pat Camden arrives on the scene, and he immediately packages for the press the official police response, which is that this was a violent offender who was waving a knife in a menacing way and had to be shot. You know, the stunning thing is that even after the video is released, even after Pat Camden, Dean Angelo—who’s the spokesman for the FOP; Dean Angelo, the former head of the FOP at the time; and Garry McCarthy, the police chief—even after they saw the video, they were able—they looked at it and said that this looks like a justified shooting.
One of the interesting, sort of poignant parts of this story is that the first responding officers, they’re responding to a 911 call saying that there’s a kid who might be breaking into trucks in a truck yard. They show up. It’s Officer Gaffney and Officer McElligott. And they do everything kind of by the book, as you would expect law enforcement officers to deal with it. They don’t provoke McDonald. They see he has a knife. They follow behind him, 10 paces back, with their lights on, and they call in and ask for a Taser, for the only kind of nonlethal enforcement they have. They follow him for a significant amount of time. More and more officers are arriving. The Taser is on its way. And then, suddenly, Van Dyke’s car pulls up. He jumps out of his car. And in under six seconds, he’s unloading his clip into Laquan McDonald.
And so, these officers have now just witnessed an atrocity. And they go, and they all have to make their statements. So, the statements from—there are nine other officers on the scene. Most of the statements say that—you know, tell a completely unfactual account of what happened, that Laquan was waving the knife, advancing on Officer Van Dyke, which obviously is just a lie. Several of the officers say, “I didn’t see anything.” The officer who’s driving the car that has the dash cam in it claims that they didn’t see anything happen.
So, that was, you know, the greatest act of resistance probably that was imaginable for an officer at that time, knowing that even if you tell the truth, nothing is going to happen to this officer, because nothing ever has in the 180-year history of the Chicago Police Department, and that the only outcome is going to be that you’re going to end your career, potentially, and put yourself in danger. So, anyway, all of the officers’ statements kind of corroborate this completely untrue story that Laquan was the aggressor.
one of the remarkable things is that in spite of all the facts that we have about this case, in spite of the video, in spite of all of the evidence that’s come forward, those facts are not enough to secure the narrative. Even in the face of those facts, there is another story, a competing story, that is very powerful in this country and that’s built on racial fear. And that is what was being mobilized on the other side of this sort of discourse.
So you see that unfold in the trial. The defense invokes it constantly. There are these amazing moments where Dan Herbert, the defense attorney for Officer Van Dyke, talks about this as a “horror film.” He says, “Imagine you’re watching a horror film, and the monster suddenly turns and looks at you, and then the music starts to play. That’s what happened here.” So, he’s casting Laquan McDonald as a monster.
Dean Angelo says—you know, the former head of the FOP—says to Jacquie Soohen, the producer and interviewer, “You know, people need to recognize, no one is accepting the fact that what we need to do is go after that monster, who doesn’t belong in the street with you or my wife or my daughter”—basically, with white women, like invoking the oldest nightmare, American racial nightmare, there is.
So, that would have been the end of it, ordinarily, in any one of these thousands of other cases where this has happened. But two things happened that weren’t expected. First, a whistleblower in law enforcement got in touch with investigative journalist Jamie Kalven and told him, “There’s a video out there. There’s a video, and it’s horrific.” And he was worried that it might be destroyed if no one started asking for it.
The other parallel thing that happened was the family began to ask questions. So, Pastor Marvin Hunter, the great-uncle of Laquan McDonald, he—when Laquan’s body was delivered to the funeral home, the funeral home called him up and told him, “You know, in the news, they were saying he was shot once in the chest, but he’s full of bullet holes.” So they took pictures, and they took those to an attorney, and they began the process of exploring civil litigation around the case, which ended up opening a separate kind of line of inquiry that helped rip the case open.
one of the essential processes through this is that everyone inside the system is playing by the rules of a game that’s existed for over a hundred years. And they know that they’re going to win, because they’ve always won. But what they don’t realize is that outside, in the street and in culture, the rules of that whole game are changing. They live in a different world by the end of this case than they did at the beginning. And they live in a different world because there’s a social movement out there that changed that world. And Charlene Carruthers, the former head of BYP100, and Will Calloway, an activist who became involved with this case from the very beginning, are responsible in a large way for those changes that happened.
So, Will was an activist working on police issues, on the Rekia Boyd shooting, which happened in Chicago a year earlier. When he read Jamie Kalven’s piece that revealed that there was a video out there, he FOIAed for the video, along with a bunch of other media outlets. Like a couple dozen media outlets FOIAed for the video. All the FOIAs were denied—ongoing investigation. You know, it’s a typical logic that is deployed whenever people want to keep things hidden. No one—everyone else dropped it. Will didn’t drop it. He sued the city. Everyone—you know, he sued the city, and he won. It was another unprecedented moment for transparency in the city.
So, suddenly, the city realizes that this entire machine, that they had had faith in would continue to function, had fallen apart. It had just exploded. And so, the state’s attorney, Anita Alvarez, immediately brings murder charges against Officer Van Dyke—this is the first time an officer has ever been charged for murdering a black citizen—a day before the video is released.
Then the video is released, and it sends shockwaves through the city, because this video is—you know, there are a lot of videos of these shootings that are circulating now. Most of them are, you know, shaky cellphone videos, partial recordings—the recording begins partway through the encounter. This video is unparalleled in its clarity. It’s a locked-off shot from the dash cam of a police car, and you see every second of Officer Van Dyke’s interactions with Laquan McDonald. You see his car pull up, him jump out of it and begin to fire. There isn’t a second before the video starts; you see everything. And because it’s happening on a street with the lane lines painted, it might as well have been taking place on graph paper. You can see that Laquan is moving away. You can see that he’s no threat. It has—and you can see his body lying on the ground while Van Dyke continues to shoot into him. It’s unprecedented in its clarity and in the horror you see in it.
the city—we know from internal email and communications that have been—you know, that journalists sued for and have been released, that the city was obsessed with this case. All of Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s senior staff were discussing it. They were circulating stories about it. They were talking about the video. But there was no lawsuit filed about it yet.
So, Rahm Emanuel is in a very tight runoff with—and he didn’t win a majority, an outright majority, in the first election. It’s in a runoff. It’s very close. It looks like he might lose. And this video could be released at any moment by the family, if they decide to bring charges. So, the lawyer for the city—the Mayor’s Office sends their lawyer to make a $5 million settlement with Laquan McDonald’s family—before any charges have been filed. There’s no lawsuit. It’s a preemptive settlement, $5 million to delay the release of the video ’til after the election is over.
when heads really started to roll around this case and the institutions inside the city split, turned against each other, people began briefing against each other. And so we were able to get much more candid interviews from everyone around. It’s a great moment to be a documentary filmmaker when that happens.
But we interviewed Anita Alvarez while she was still state’s attorney. And she makes it very clear. She admits that she saw the video right away, but she says, “It’s very hard to prosecute police officers. And, you know, we didn’t—we thought we would lose.” But once the video is about ready to be—is going to be released, and they know it’s going to be released, she’s worried about civil unrest in the city. She’s worried there will be riots. So she charges Van Dyke with murder the day before the video is released, to try to preempt the anger that everyone knows is going to roll out into the street.
charges have been brought against Van Dyke the day before this video is released. The whole city is expecting—doesn’t know what to expect, expects civil unrest. The police are on high alert. People are talking about riots. And the movement—well, the whole city clusters around their phones and their computers to watch the video the moment it is released. And when they see it, it is shocking, it is graphic, it is horrific. And the protesters pour out into the streets on Black Friday, the busiest shopping day of the year. And they shut down the— The day after Thanksgiving. And they shut down the Magnificent Mile in downtown Chicago.
– Calloway. “So, when I saw Laquan, I saw me.”
that’s a sentiment that was felt throughout the kind of movement out there. Will has described it, at different times, as a kind of divine justice or divine poetry, that Laquan McDonald, a figure who was so marginalized in the city that he was practically invisible up until the moment of his death, ended up taking down the most powerful people in the city of Chicago.
The trial has been this amazing kind of public spectacle in Chicago, the focal point of the city’s attention for the weeks that it happens. And as the jury is—as the case is given to the jury and they go in to deliberate, the city is on the edge of its seat. I mean, the people, again, are fearing riots if there’s an acquittal.
When everyone is called back, because there’s—a verdict is ready, I’m filming in front of City Hall, because 100 or 200 activists have gathered in front of City Hall, and their plan is—they’re certain it’s going to be a “not guilty” verdict. It’s unimaginable that a police officer will be found guilty of murdering a black citizen. And so their plan is to go inside City Hall and shut it down—shut it down, if it comes back “not guilty,” and be arrested. So we’re standing outside. The whole group is leaning into their cellphones, playing the video over megaphones—or, the audio over megaphones. It is this incredible moment.
And as the verdict is read, first, guilty of second-degree murder, and then the 16 counts, one for every shot—shot one, guilty; shot two, guilty; shot three, guilty—as those shots are being read out, people are weeping. They’re in tears. Something unimaginable has happened to them. It’s like a tear has opened in the fabric of political reality, and something else is visible on the other side of it. I have seldom seen moments of that kind of intense public intimacy. And I was incredibly grateful to be able to be there and see it. But there was a feeling amongst everyone there that a page had been turned and that something—we were in a new moment, a new moment that we were going to all have to find out what it meant.
months later, in January of this year, two things happened, days apart. First, there was a conspiracy trial for the other officers on the scene, where they were charged with conspiring to cover up this murder. All of them were acquitted. The next day, Van Dyke was sentenced, and the judge, Judge Gaughan, decided not to consider the 16 counts of aggravated battery, one for each shot, only consider the second-degree murder, and gave him six-and-a-half years, eligible for release in three years.
And, you know, we talked to the jurors, who felt betrayed. I mean, they went in there—so, each count of aggravated battery carries 6 to 30 years per count. They thought that they were giving a verdict that was going to mean Van Dyke was going to jail for the rest of his life. And instead, it was shortened to, you know, less time than—I mean, there are hundreds of people in Cook County Jail right now awaiting trial for more than three years because they can’t afford the 500 bucks it would take to make bail.
there’s two things that cut through this for me. The first is, you know, the scale, the massive scale of the cover-up. I mean, this is not a scandal. This is not aberrant behavior. This isn’t three people in a room deciding that they’re going to clear this one bad officer. This is every institution in the city being complicit in this in some way or another, in small or large ways.
The other lesson is that for all of the strengths of this machine, it broke down. That wall of silence was shattered in this case. And it was shattered because dozens of people, at crucial moments, came forward and took brave stands and broke it, and also because of the sustained attention and pressure of movements. I mean, this is a story arc that’s four years long. People stayed on this. They stayed in the street. They stayed active, and they kept pushing this. And so, that—I’m in awe of the people of Chicago and of the journalists and the social movements there who maintained the pressure throughout and managed to win victories that have been elusive in every other city in this country.
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Rick Rowley
director of 16 Shots.
— source democracynow.org | Jun 17, 2019