Chicago on trial

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Sean Rameswaram: Around 10 o'clock at night, a little before 10 o'clock at night, there was a call to 911 about someone breaking into trucks. Two officers arrived on scene. And these two officers follow Laquan McDonald as he's walking along the street carrying this knife by his side. It has about a three-inch blade. And one of the officers is on foot about 10, 12 feet behind while the other officer follows along in his car. These officers have said that they didn't see him making any threatening motions and that what they were essentially doing was buying time until an officer could arrive on scene with a taser, which they had called for over the radio.

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Sean Rameswaram: At one point, police officers block Laquan's movements with a police car. And McDonald takes this knife he has and he pops the tire. And there's also an autopsy that was later done, officers didn't know this at the time, showing that Laquan McDonald had PCP in his system. And eventually other police arrive on scene, and Laquan McDonald ends up walking down the middle of the street. This is when Jason Van Dyke arrives, and he's in the passenger side of a police car with his partner. He gets out of the car, and within about six seconds of arriving, begins shooting. He shoots 16 times, including after Laquan is lying on the ground. Van Dyke moved to reload his gun, but his partner stopped him. His partner then went over to Laquan McDonald's body and kicked a knife out of his hand. No one on scene tried to deliver aid to Laquan McDonald. You can see the officers standing around on a video of this incident. And at some point, someone from the Cook County Sheriff's Office arrived. So that's a different law enforcement department. He says he walked over to deliver aid and he could still hear McDonald breathing and making a gurgling noise. Then less than a minute after the shooting, you see another car arrive on scene. That's the officer with the taser that they had called for.

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Sean Rameswaram: The 16 shots a white police officer named Jason Van Dyke unloaded into a black teenager named Laquan McDonald. The 16 shots that killed him almost didn't get noticed. It was almost just another shooting involving the cops. The Chicago Tribune found that there were over 400 of them in a recent six-year period. Almost 100 people died. But eventually, a few Chicago journalists got word that something was really wrong with this one. They started looking into it. They asked to see dashcam footage of what happened on that night in October 2014. It took a year to get the video. But once they did, it became clear that Laquan McDonald would have a second life. That the second life of Laquan McDonald would change Chicago. And it has.

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Sean Rameswaram: Since dying, Laquan McDonald has brought new leadership to the city. He's brought a federal investigation of the city's policing practices. And for the first time in decades, Laquan McDonald was able to bring murder charges against a Chicago police officer. The trial of Jason Van Dyke, the officer who shot Laquan McDonald, began in Chicago this week. Shannon Heffernan from WBEZ was there.

Shannon Heffernan: Well, first there was jury selection. There were 200 people called to fill out questionnaires. That's a lot of people. There's usually not that many people called for a murder trial in Cook County. There was a lot of conversation about race during jury selection. The prosecution called out the defense team for purposely trying to strike black jurors and keep them off the jury. The head defense attorney in this case actually has a history of this. In a recent case of another police officer, he was accused of trying to strike black jurors, and the judge chided him for that. Defense shot back that the prosecution was doing the same thing but for white jurors. In the end, though, a lot of white jurors did end up on the jury. We think it's seven white jurors, one black juror, one Asian juror, and three Latinas.

Shannon Heffernan: I say I think because these were all IDs that reporters did with their eyeballs. They weren't self-ID'd by jurors. They didn't talk about that and were not allowed to talk to the jurors. And the jury includes a nuclear engineer, a stay-at-home mom, a financial analyst, and a woman who's in the process of applying to be a CPD officer, a Chicago police officer. She's already passed the written and physical exams, and now she's going to be sitting on the jury. So opening arguments were this week. They were on Monday. What were the arguments made? I'll talk about the prosecution first. The prosecution painted a picture of the scene that night as a scene that was under control. When the defendants started shooting, Laquan McDonald was walking toward a chain link fence in a vacant lot, surrounded by five squad cars and 10 fully armed and protected Chicago police officers. Laquan McDonald, yes, he had a knife, but he wasn't a direct threat to anyone.

Shannon Heffernan: They also made a big deal about how there were these other officers on scene who didn't shoot. They showed a video of that other officer that I talked about earlier walking about 10 to 12 feet behind McDonald and just following him for a while. They're basically laying a foundation of the case we expect them to make, which is other reasonable officers would not have done what Van Dyke did. And we know that they would not have done what Van Dyke did because they didn't do it that night. They also showed the dash cam video of the shooting. And the prosecutor in this case is pretty even-handed, like a pretty calm speaker. I think this was maybe the most dramatic moment of his opening statements. He counted out all 16 shots, one by one, like one, two, three, four. Five, six, seven, eight. He's only halfway done. Nine, ten, eleven, twelve, thirteen, fourteen, fifteen, sixteen times in total. Sixteen gunshots into the defenseless body of Laquan McDonald. The point he was landing is there was no reason to shoot Laquan McDonald even once, let alone 16 times.

Shannon Heffernan: The government made a big deal about 16 shots. They even did that dramatic, slow pause countdown. The defense, in their opening arguments, they painted a very different picture of what happened that night. What the evidence is going to show is that it was a scared police officer, fearful for his life and others, and he acted within his training. They said to the jury, we focused on the last chapter of a story, but you need to know the whole story. You need to know what happened before that. The defense attorney painted a picture of Laquan McDonald as dangerous. He talked about how he had PCP in his system. And he made a deal out of something that Laquan McDonald had been traveling around the city on a bus pass that didn't belong to him. That was an argument for how he was dangerous? Well, he didn't specifically say that, but these are the kind of little details that they've been dropping in.

Shannon Heffernan: But in the opening statements, you did see them start to try to paint this picture of him. The defense attorney was holding the knife that Laquan McDonald had that night while he was giving opening statements. And he was swinging it around in the air. And he whips out the knife. Laquan is planning to attack at this point. He talked about how Laquan McDonald locked eyes on Van Dyke. Think about it like a horror movie that you've watched. You see the villain walking down the street. Not very fearful, but when he stops and he turns and makes eye contact with the victim, then that's when the music starts playing.

Shannon Heffernan: He also spoke to those 16 shots, because that's going to be something that the defense team is going to have to deal with, how many times Van Dyke shot. And he talked about how when an officer shoots... There are significant physiological changes that they experience, which impacts their decision making. And so you see them start to build this case. I will say that the prosecution probably saw it coming, that the defense team was going to bring in Laquan McDonald's reputation to all of this, because in their opening arguments, they made a point of saying, Laquan McDonald is not on trial here. His background couldn't possibly have any bearing on the defendant's state of mind when the defendant shot Laquan 16 times.

Shannon Heffernan: So prosecution is going to try to keep the jurors focused as much as possible on Van Dyke's actions that night, where the defense team is going to try to make jurors start to wonder about Laquan McDonald's character. So it's been a few days since opening arguments. Has anything else happened in the trial that's important here? Well, I think the biggest thing that's happened is that Jason Van Dyke's partner actually took the stand. He's an officer named Joseph Walsh. And he talked about how Laquan McDonald raised the knife and how he thinks that he was a danger and Van Dyke made the right call. And prosecutors really pushed back on this saying, you know, that's not what the video shows. We don't see him raising the knife. And Walsh said, well, that wasn't my viewpoint. It looked different from where I was standing.

Shannon Heffernan: And I think this is going to be a point you're going to hear to Fent's head is the video shows the perspective from the dash cam of another car on the scene. Not from where Van Dyke was standing. So I should say here that Joseph Walsh, he's also on trial, in a separate trial, but it's about the same shooting. Prosecutors allege that he lied that night and tried to make out Laquan McDonald to be more dangerous than he actually was. So that's another trial that's going to be getting underway in the fall. Uh, Walsh was, uh, given use immunity for his testimony, meaning anything he said on the stand during this trial couldn't be used against him in his trial. Um, but he pretty much stuck to a story despite prosecutors just really pushing on him again and again that what he's saying he witnessed is not what the video shows.

Sean Rameswaram: You can see the officers standing around on a video of this incident. And at some point, someone from the Cook County Sheriff's Office arrived. So that's a different law enforcement department. He says he walked over to deliver aid and he could still hear McDonald breathing and making a gurgling noise. Then less than a minute after the shooting, you see another car arrive on scene. That's the officer with the taser that they had called for.

Shannon Heffernan: What does this one mean for the city of Chicago? Well, I think this shooting and this trial are huge for Chicago. Chicago citizens are not used to seeing a Chicago police officer on trial for an on-duty shooting. It hasn't happened in decades. And this shooting, when the video came out, it sparked massive changes in Chicago. A prominent Chicago reverend, for example, said, the name at the center of Chicago right now, the name of the changes you're seeing is Laquan McDonald. He was a throwaway person if there ever was one. And as a pastor, you know, to me that's divine poetry. That would have to be the one that God would have to put in the center of the power dynamic, the name that somebody else thinks is worth throwing away.

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Shannon Heffernan: I think it's really important here to talk about the history in Chicago. Chicago has a long history of issues of race and policing. In 1969, you have Fred Hampton, he's a prominent Black Panther, being shot by police. The officers' accounts are insufficient to establish probable cause to charge the officers with a willful violation of the occupant's civil rights. Then you have John Burge. He's a police commander who oversaw the torture of mostly black men in Chicago. More than 100 people, almost all of them black men, made documented complaints of police torturing them into confessions. And these stories are pretty, they're pretty difficult to hear about.

Shannon Heffernan: On and proceeded to shock me on my test coups. And this went on for a long time, for two decades stretching into the 1990s. Burge was eventually fired, but people who were tortured under his leadership spent years in prison for confessions they gave after they were tortured. John Burge put a lot of bad guys in prison that belonged to me. People picked a career part that was considered for a long time to be an honorable career. And so you can connect this reprehensible history of the Chicago Police Department with what happened with Laquan McDonald?

Shannon Heffernan: I think it connects in terms of the anger you see from the community. We've been going to community meetings and we've been talking to activists. And the thing we hear over and over again is we knew this. We been saying this for years. And what different now is we have a video of it. So people are paying attention. So I think that there's this feeling of it not just about this shooting. It's about decades of what's been happening with police in the black community in Chicago. The feeling is like if you need another horrific video of someone being murdered by police to care, then you don't.

Shannon Heffernan: And so I think this case is carrying the weight not only of the shooting that happened that night, which in and of itself is dramatic no matter what angle you're looking at it from, but it's also carrying the weight of this history. And the weight, I would argue, maybe even beyond policing, the weight of Chicago's history of segregation. We still live in an extremely segregated city. When people are thinking and talking about this trial, they're viewing it through that lens often.

Shannon Heffernan: What are the political ramifications of the video once it comes out for Rahm Emanuel, for the Chicago Police Department? So when the video came out, activists called for three people to be ousted. And now all three of those people are either out of their jobs or on their way out of their jobs. Chicago's top cop was fired. Our lead prosecutor lost her election. Now, this may not have been the only issue she was facing, but it definitely was one of them. And our mayor, Mayor Rahm Emanuel, has decided not to run for re-election.

Shannon Heffernan: There's also with the police department, the Department of Justice, the federal Department of Justice, came in to investigate the police department in part because of this video. The Department of Justice has concluded that the Chicago Police Department engages in a pattern or practice of use of excessive force in violation of the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution. And as a result of that report, the city has now made an agreement to reform its police department and do this list of specific things, these lists of specific ways it's going to change. And that agreement is going to be overseen by a federal court.

Shannon Heffernan: So with the change in leadership in Chicago, with this trial of Jason Van Dyke, are people in Chicago hopeful that there might be a shift in the tide? I think you see both, right? I think on one side you see people who are saying, finally, this is getting attention. For the mothers who lost their sons and daughters and their babies, who were told to their faces that they were lying, if for nothing else, I want to say thank you, DOJ. Because now we can say, I told you so.

Shannon Heffernan: But I also see a lot of people who are pretty skeptical. You know, after these other things happen, like Commander Burge, the cases of torture, you saw calls for reform then too, and you saw promises for reform. So I think that there's also some people who are just saying, you know, They don't trust that there's going to be movement. We also have the Chicago Police Union. The police union, as all this was unfolding, elected officers who their line of thinking is that there's a really strong anti-policing sentiment in Chicago. Union officials have been pretty outspoken about not liking the reforms that have happened. And I can imagine are going to try to make sure through their contract that some of those reforms can't go into place.

Shannon Heffernan: And what if Jason Van Dyke is acquitted? I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. You've heard the defense team argue in court that they think if he's acquitted that there will be riots. And they bring up that point because they're talking about how jurors might be intimidated into making a certain decision. There was also fear that the city was going to riot when the video came out. And that didn't happen. There's a lot of young black activists on the ground who have been pretty organized. And so there's some feeling that maybe that actually helped control the protests and keep them organized. But it's really hard to guess what's going to happen if he gets acquitted. I don't know.

Sean Rameswaram: Shannon Heffernan is a criminal justice reporter at WBEZ in Chicago. She's been following the shooting of Laquan McDonald for a podcast called 16 Shots, along with two other reporters, Chip Mitchell and Patrick Smith. John Burge, the disgraced Chicago police commander who was convicted of lying about torturing black Chicagoans into false confessions, he died Wednesday in Florida. He was 70 years old.

Sean Rameswaram: I'm Sean Rameswaram. This is Today Explained. Thanks to Tom's for supporting our show this week for delivering these shoes into our lives. You can get 15% off plus free shipping of your first order at toms.com slash explained. And you know the drill, with every purchase you make, Tom's will help a person in need. Thanks.