We are indeed elated that Mayor Rahm Emanuel has finally taken steps to deal with what was apparently the Chicago Police department’s coverup of the execution shooting of Laquan McDonald in October 2014. For more than a year, the police withheld the video that clearly shows the teenager walking away before being felled by a fusillade of bullets from the gun of officer Jason Van Dyke. Most of the 16 bullets riddled McDonald’s body while he was on the ground.
The incident aroused protesters there and elsewhere and prompted the mayor to act. But equally deplorable is the time it took before the video was released, which begs another question: Why are the videos from body cameras and dashboard cameras sole possessions of the police? As one commentator has noted, for the police to have custody and control of the videos is like the fox guarding the henhouse.
As we have demanded on these pages, thoroughgoing transparency in our criminal justice system, including the grand jury process, and the creation of a special prosecutor in cases involving police misconduct, we insist that the videos recorded by police body cameras and dashboard cameras be placed in the hands of an independent body or agency. Such action would be, we feel, mutually beneficial for the police and the people who have encounters with them.
In a recent op-ed in the New York Times, Sarah Lustbader, a staff attorney at the Bronx Defenders, bolstered this point when she wrote, “Video footage would be more credible in the public eye; police officers wouldn’t be suspected of doctoring footage after every technical glitch. It would also protect individual officers, especially those, such as whistle-blowers and union activists, who had reason to fear that supervisors might comb through their footage for any minor infraction to use against them.”
But even with the prevalence of videos—and the few instances in which they have proved decisive in disclosing what actually happened—there is a deeper concern. What can be done to make sure the officers will turn on the body cameras, which are being used by an increasing number of police departments across the nation? It may be impractical to expect the cameras to be on during an officer’s entire duty, but something has to be done whenever a possible confrontation develops. Perhaps there can be some coordination between the alerts they receive, 9/11 calls or transmissions from officer to officer during an encounter that will automatically require the cameras be engaged.
Ever since the brutal beating of Rodney King in California in 1991, a savage attack that seemed to go on for several minutes, the documentation of police misconduct has been a topic of discussion. Nowadays, with practically everyone possessing a cellphone with video capability, a number of confrontations between the police and civilians have been recorded. Without these videos, the public would be at the mercy of police accounts, and we wouldn’t know exactly what happened to Eric Garner (and we still insist on opening the grand jury testimony in this case), Walter Scott, Tamir Rice or McDonald.
Because it took so much time for the videos to finally be released in Chicago—and we extend our gratitude to the journalist who filed a lawsuit to get the video released—questions remain as to how widespread the coverup was, and when and how much the mayor knew about the tragedy. The truth may be unearthed during the ongoing investigation, especially if the Justice Department enters the case, or the determining outcome may rest with the voters in Chicago.
We await the results on this investigation with the same interest we have in a similar case, the police shooting of Jamar Clark in Minneapolis on Nov. 15. The video of that incident, protesters charge, will show exactly what happened to Clark. We hope that a cover up there isn’t business as usual.