McDonald, angry and confused, began getting in trouble as early as the fourth grade, when he threw a chair at a teacher and threatened to kill her. In 2011, he had 10 school suspensions and drifted into selling marijuana to support his habit. He also began an affiliation, he said, with two gangs—the New Breeds and the Four Corner Hustlers. “It was the hood I was in,” he told a counselor two summers before his death. He said his childhood friends had joined gangs and it looked like they were “having fun.” He told the counselor he got into a few gang-related fights with “sticks and bottles,” but never a gun or a knife. By the time he was 10, it was clear that his great-grandmother couldn’t keep up with him, and it wasn’t long before police in his Austin neighborhood took notice.
His great-grandmother told court officials he would “normally get arrested two or three days a week.” She did not believe the police were “picking on him,” she said. In fact, she noted, officers let him go with several reprimands. Seven of his police arrests between 2012 and 2014 resulted in juvenile court cases, nearly all involving possession of small amounts of drugs. He was placed on long periods of intensive probation, often with electronic monitoring, mandatory school attendance, community service, outpatient mental health services, drug treatment, and in-home therapy. On his last marijuana arrest, he spent four months in juvenile detention before being released in May 2014. Just days before his 17th birthday and a month before his death, McDonald took the initiative to attend Sullivan House High School, a school for at-risk students and high school dropouts between the ages of 16 and 21. Instructors said he was apparently trying to turn his life around. He was quick to smile and hug his teachers, school officials said, and he regularly made A’s and B’s. Most importantly, he never got into any trouble there, they said. On October 24, he was scheduled for a hearing, and, with a good report, might be released from probation.
Instead, shortly before 10 p.m. on October 20, 2014, police were called to investigate reports of a man carrying a knife at 4100 South Pulaski Road. It was McDonald. The caller said the man had been breaking into vehicles in a trucking yard at 41st Street and Kildare Avenue. When officers arrived on the scene, they confronted McDonald. Police said he used a knife with a three-inch blade to slice the tire on a patrol vehicle and damage its windshield. McDonald walked away from police after numerous verbal instructions from the officers to drop the knife. At that point, responding officers requested taser backup, according to radio recordings. The police may have suspected what was ultimately proven in the autopsy: McDonald had taken PCP, a powerful hallucinogen.
PCP, according to Drugs.com, “often causes users to feel detached, distant, and estranged from their surroundings. Numbness of the extremities, slurred speech, and loss of coordination may be accompanied by a sense of strength and invulnerability. A blank stare, rapid and involuntary eye movements, and an exaggerated gait are among the more observable effects. Auditory hallucinations, image distortion, severe mood disorders, and amnesia may also occur. In some users, PCP may cause acute anxiety and a feeling of impending doom; in others, paranoia and violent hostility, and in some, it may produce a psychosis indistinguishable from schizophrenia. Many believe PCP to be one of the most dangerous drugs of abuse.” Let me just tell you this: PCP is a cop’s worst nightmare. I wrestled with more suspects on PCP than I care to recall. One is too many. They are impervious to pain and have superhuman strength. It’s dangerous, and the best strategy is to steer clear of PCP users until adequate backup reaches the scene. The officers were wise to give McDonald a wide berth.
Other patrol cars and several officers were already on the scene when Jason Van Dyke and his partner, Joseph Walsh, arrived in a police cruiser. So far, none of the officers had unholstered their guns. None feared for their life. Walsh and Van Dyke exited their vehicle, guns drawn, and within 10 seconds, Van Dyke began firing at McDonald. McDonald was at least 10 feet away from him. Van Dyke’s first shot spun McDonald to the ground. He lay there and never made another move. Van Dyke then proceeded to fire 15 more shots over 15 seconds until his 9mm semiautomatic pistol was empty. Count it off: 1 Mississippi, 2 Mississippi, 3 Mississippi, 4 Mississippi, 5 Mississippi, 6 Mississippi, 7 Mississippi, 8 Mississippi, 9 Mississippi, 10 Mississippi, 11 Mississippi, 12 Mississippi, 13 Mississippi, 14 Mississippi, 15 Mississippi.
When it was over, the first responding officer said that he did not see the need to use force. No other officers fired their weapons. Walsh and Van Dyke were the only officers to pull their guns. McDonald was taken to Mount Sinai Hospital, where he was pronounced dead at 10:42 p.m. His death marked the end of a brief, troubled life, and the beginning of a city’s lesson into the depths that police and public officials would go to hide the truth behind his murder.
10.
THE COVER-UP
Initially, Laquan McDonald’s death was hardly a blip on the radar screen of the Chicago Police Department and most residents of the city. And why would it be? Chicago’s police department had been synonymous with racism, brutality, and corruption for so long that few current residents can remember when there wasn’t a police scandal. By the late 1950s, police officers’ practice of collecting bribes from motorists and pedestrians, and “presents” and other “gifts” from retail merchants around Christmas, had gone on so long that Chicago residents had come to expect this from their officers. A friend told me that when he attended Northwestern University in the late 1960s, everyone knew, if you were driving into the city, to wrap a $20 bill, bribe money, around your driver’s license in case a Chicago cop stopped you.
Still, Chicagoans were surprised to learn in 1960 that several of their officers were helping a professional burglar sneak into and rob homes of wealthy North Side residents during what became known as the Summerdale Scandal. The eight officers acted as lookouts for burglar Richard Morrison during the break-ins and helped haul away the loot in their squad cars. Ironically, it was the cops’ idea to forge the partnership. Morrison said that when they approached him with the proposition, they told him, “We like nice things, too.”
1970s and 1980s
Those offenses were minuscule affairs compared to the crimes Chicago cop Jon Burge and others committed, starting 12 years later. From 1972 to 1991, Burge, a Chicago police detective, and other officers whose help he enlisted, tortured hundreds of African-American and Latino men accused of crimes until they gave false confessions. Scores of his victims went to prison, including at least four men who were sentenced to death. Burge and the officers used vicious beatings, Russian roulette, and other violent methods. They burned suspects with radiators and cigarettes and shocked their testicles with electric cattle prods to coerce confessions. When the extent of their crimes began to be revealed years later, then–Illinois Governor George Ryan in 2000 declared a moratorium on all executions in the state, because it was unclear whether many of the black men on death row were there because they were guilty or because Chicago police had tortured them into giving false confessions. Ryan later pardoned four of Burge’s victims on death row and commuted the sentences of 167 inmates slated to be executed.
Burge and his men acted with impunity. City officials, police, and prosecutors all knew by the mid-1970s of Burge’s torture tactics, but they were allowed to continue until he was fired in 1993. Ironically, Burge was never tried in court for torture because the statute of limitations had expired. Instead, he was convicted in 2010 on charges of obstruction of justice and perjury in relation to testimony in a 1989 civil suit against him for damages for alleged torture. He was sentenced to four and a half years in federal prison on January 21, 2011, and was out in October of that year.
The case of Andrew Wilson is just one example of what happened during Burge’s reign of terror. In 1982, Wilson was arrested on a February morning for the murder of two police officers. At the end of the day, he was taken by police and admitted to Mercy Hospital and Medical Center with lacerations on various parts of his head, including his face, chest bruises, and thigh burns. More
than a dozen injuries were documented as having been caused while Wilson was in police custody. A doctor who saw Wilson sent a memo to Richard M. Daley, then the prosecuting attorney for Chicago and surrounding Cook County. He asked Daley’s office to investigate what he saw as a clear case of police brutality.
“I examined Mr. Andrew Wilson on Feb. 15 & 16, 1982,” the doctor wrote. “He had multiple bruises, swellings and abrasions on his face and head. His right eye was battered and had a superficial laceration. Andrew Wilson had several linear blisters on his right thigh, right cheek and anterior chest which were consistent with radiator burns. He stated he’d been cuffed to a radiator and pushed into it. He also stated that electrical shocks had been administered to his gums, lips and genitals. All these injuries occurred prior to his arrival at the jail. There must be a thorough investigation of this alleged brutality.”
Daley, son of the former longtime mayor Richard J. Daley, would be elected the 43rd and longest-serving mayor in Chicago’s history; he ignored the doctor’s report. Instead, Daley’s prosecutors convicted Wilson and his brother, Jackie, of the murders, and Andrew Wilson was sentenced to death. In 1987, the Illinois Supreme Court overturned the convictions, ruling that Wilson was forced to confess involuntarily after being beaten by police. An internal police report that had been suppressed for years revealed an earlier police review that found criminal suspects were subjected to systematic brutality by Burge and his men at headquarters for 12 years, and that their commanders had knowledge of the abuses.
Scores of people came forward to tell of their torture at the hands of Burge and other police officers. Gregory Banks filed a civil suit in 1991 for $16 million in damages against Burge, three other cops, and the city of Chicago. He said he had falsely confessed to murder in 1983 after he was tortured by officers who placed a plastic bag over his head and put a gun in his mouth. While he was being tortured, he said, he saw 11 other men being beaten, burned, and getting electric shocks. Marcus Wiggins filed a lawsuit against Burge and the city, alleging that, when he was 13, he had been subjected to electric shock and forced to give a false confession. Another lawsuit described 23 incidents against black and Latino suspects between 1972 and 1985, and more than 150 Illinois state prisoners filed suit against the city, saying Burge had tortured them as well into making false confessions.
Legal wrangling and fallout from the Burge scandal continued until 2015. Ultimately, the city paid more than $57 million to his victims and spent another $50 million on defense of the officers.
1990s
Through the years, cases of police corruption continued unabated. In 1996, seven officers from the Austin District on Chicago’s West Side were charged with shaking down drug dealers for cash and narcotics. A year later, three cops in the Auburn Gresham District were charged with similar offenses, and the police superintendent resigned after it was discovered that, in violation of department rules, he was buddies with a convicted felon.
In a case that would lay bare the city’s underlying bias, police charged two African-American boys, ages 7 and 8, with the rape and murder of an 11-year-old girl, Ryan Harris. It was 1998. Police claimed the boys had confessed to striking her with a rock, then raping her with a tubular object and suffocating her with her underwear by stuffing it in her mouth. The boys, and, by extension, their parents and Chicago’s mostly black South Side communities were vilified by prosecutors, police, and politicians as “depraved” and “monsters.” A month after their arrest, however, police found semen on the girl’s underwear. They couldn’t have done it. Boys aged 7 and 8 don’t produce semen. The real murderer was a man named Floyd Durr, a sexual predator who had preyed on girls and teenagers in the area. He pleaded guilty and received a life sentence, plus 30 years. Prosecutors said his IQ was so low he was not eligible for the death penalty.
The following year, an unarmed black man and an unarmed black woman were shot and killed by police in the same week in separate and suspicious incidents. What was so striking was not the circumstances, but who they were in the community. Robert Russ was an honors student and a star football player for prestigious Northwestern University in nearby Evanston, Illinois. LaTanya Haggerty was a 26-year-old computer analyst. Russ was 22 years old and two weeks from graduation when he was shot. He had been chased by police and his car had come to a stop. He was unarmed inside the vehicle. A Chicago jury awarded Russ’s 4-year-old son $9.6 million after finding that the officer who shot him acted “willfully and wantonly” in causing his death.
Following a high-speed chase of a car in which Haggerty was a passenger, she was shot by a female officer who said she saw an object in the car that appeared to be a gun. There was no gun. According to the department’s investigation, the officers ignored a sergeant’s order to end the high-speed chase. The officers failed to get immediate medical help for Haggerty after she was shot. Three officers fired their guns without justification, the department said, and three officers gave false information to investigators about the incident. Haggerty’s family was awarded $18 million.
2000s
The number of cases of corruption and malfeasance against Chicago’s cops picked up in 2001. In April of that year, Chicago police officer Joseph Miedzianowski was convicted of racketeering and conspiracy to distribute drugs. He was later sentenced to life without the possibility of parole. Miedzianowski used his position as head of the Chicago Gangs Unit for most of his 22 years on the force to organize four different gangs in the Humboldt Park neighborhood and begin trafficking in crack cocaine. He shook down rival drug dealers while using his contacts to provide protection and reveal the identities of undercover police officers to gang members. In all, 24 people were convicted with him, including the leaders of the four street gangs, Miedzianowski’s mistress, and his former police partner.
Six months after Miedzianowski was convicted, Chicago Police Deputy Superintendent William Hanhardt, one of the highest-ranking officers in the police department, pleaded guilty to running a nationwide jewel-theft ring. For over 20 years, he and his gang stole over $5 million in diamonds and other gems. Hanhardt, a member of the department for 33 years, was sentenced to 12 years in federal prison. Two months later, Chicago Police Sergeant Eddie Hicks was dragged into court and indicted for operating a gang that included another Chicago police sergeant and two civilian members of the police department. They raided known drug houses and took the money and drugs. They kept the cash and resold the drugs to other dealers.
During their capers, Hicks and his accomplices used counterfeit police department badges, phony search warrants, unmarked cars from the police department, and license plates from other police cars. When they finished a heist, they would return to the police station at 51st Street and Wentworth and divvy up the spoils. Hicks was awaiting trial after fleeing and being recaptured in 2017.
In 2007, the Chicago Police Department was engulfed in scandal after a surveillance camera at a local bar recorded drunken, off-duty police officer Anthony Abbate savagely beating female bartender Karolina Obrycka. Obrycka sued Abbate for assault and the city’s police for attempting to cover up the attack. Initially, Chicago police officers ignored the tape’s existence and failed to mention in their police report that Abbate was a city cop. Additionally, Obrycka’s attorney presented evidence, including hundreds of phone calls between Abbate and other cops in the hours after the incident in which they plotted to cover up the attack. Abbate was eventually found guilty of felony battery and lost his job. He was sentenced to two years of probation and anger management classes. In 2012, a federal grand jury sided with Obrycka and said the Chicago Police Department had tried to cover up his crime and awarded her $850,000.
In the most recent case, Cook County prosecutors threw out the convictions of 15 African-American men in November 2017 in the first mass exoneration in the history of Chicago’s courts. The men had been framed on a plethora of phony charges by a group of drug-dealing Chicago cops led by a name infamous in African-American neighborhoods on the
city’s South Side, Sergeant Ronald Watts. Convictions of five other people had been thrown out the previous day, bringing to 20 the total number of black men cleared of wrongful convictions. Two of the men had spent more than 27 years in prison for murders they didn’t commit.
For years, Watts had been forcing residents and drug dealers in one South Chicago neighborhood to pay him “protection” money. If they didn’t, he would concoct bogus cases against them and send them to prison. Residents complained to the police department and in court, but judges, prosecutors, and police Internal Affairs investigators all believed the testimony of Watts and his corrupt cops. Watts was finally caught when he tried to rob a federal agent acting as a drug courier. The arrest resulted in a relatively minor charge and Watts, the man who had sent scores of men to prison for hundreds of years on phony charges, was sentenced to a mere 22 months in custody. He was out years before his victims were exonerated. Attorneys estimate there may be as many as 500 convictions tainted by Watts. Ironically, seven of the officers who allegedly framed the men with Watts were still on the department and working the streets on the day the men’s cases were thrown out.
Even with such a long history of police malfeasance and racism, the shooting of Laquan McDonald would ultimately stun even the most hardened Chicago residents. Initially, there was no reason to believe that McDonald’s death wouldn’t be business as usual for the city. Chicago police were known for shooting people. From 2010 to 2014, they shot and killed 70 suspects, more than any other city in the nation. Overall, they shot 242 people during that period, an average of nearly one every week. It seemed unlikely that officers would be charged criminally in the McDonald case, based on the city’s history. Chicago’s Independent Police Review Authority, which had been set up in 2007 to provide a firmer hand in resolving police use-of-force cases, had investigated more than 400 police shootings by 2015—fatal and nonfatal shootings. Every shooting except for two was ruled justified, including the shooting of Calvin Cross.
The Black and the Blue Page 18
