A white Chicago police officer has been charged with murder over the shooting death of a black teenager, just one day before a deadline by which a judge has ordered the city to release a squad-car video of the incident.
Veteran officer Jason Van Dyke was indicted on Tuesday on a first-degree murder charge after shooting 17-year-old Laquan McDonald 16 times. The officer was denied bail at a hearing in Chicago’s main criminal courthouse hours after the state’s attorney, Anita Alvarez, announced the charges against him.
City officials and community leaders have been bracing for the release of the video, fearing an outbreak of unrest and demonstrations similar to what occurred in Ferguson, Baltimore and other cities after young African American men were killed by police. The judge ordered the dash-cam recording to be released by 25 November after city officials had argued for months that it could not be made public until the conclusion of several investigations.
At a press conference before the video’s official release, Alvarez said the officer’s actions “were not justified or the proper use of deadly force by an officer”.
“I have absolutely no doubt that this video will tear at the hearts of Chicagoans,” she said.
Documents filed in court describe the video’s contents, in which the teen is said to be shown walking away from officers on a Chicago street. As McDonald turns away, Van Dyke takes one step towards the teen and begins to fire his gun, the description says.
For 14 to 15 seconds, according the documents prepared by the state’s attorney’s office, the officers unloads his entire gun into the teen, who spends 13 seconds laying face down on the pavement with his arms and legs jerking from the shots making contact with his body. Three clouds of smoke appear during the incident that indicate shots hitting the pavement, according to officials.
Of the eight or more officers on the scene, Van Dyke is the only one to have discharged his weapon.
“With release of this video,” Alvarez said, “it’s really important for public safety that the citizens of Chicago know that this officer is being held responsible for his actions.”
Chicago mayor, Rahm Emanuel, said in a statement that Van Dyke violated “professional standards” and also the “moral standards that bind our community together”.
“Rather tahn uphold the law, he took the law into his own hands and it’s up to the justice system to hold him accountable,” Emanuel said. “But his actions are in no way a reflection of the dedication and professionalism that our police officers exemplify every day and that our residents expect throughout our city.”
Van Dyke is the first on-duty officer to be charged with murder while working for the Chicago police department in nearly 35 years.
Since the death of McDonald, the Chicago police union and the lawyer representing the officer have maintained that he felt that McDonald presented a serious danger to Van Dyke and other officers.
“I can’t speak to why the [other] officers didn’t shoot,” the lawyer representing Van Dyke, Daniel Herbet, told reporters on Friday, according to the Chicago Tribune. “But I certainly can speak to why my client shot, and it is he believed in his heart of hearts that he was in fear for his life, that he was concerned about the lives of [other] police officers.”
Since the incident, Van Dyke has been on paid desk leave while both federal and state investigations into the incident took place.
According to a freedom of information request by the Chicago Tribune, the veteran officer has had at least 15 complaints filed against him while working in high-crime neighborhoods, for accusations including using racial epithets and pointing a gun at an arrestee without justification.
In 2007, the officer was involved in a traffic stop in which he and his partner were found to have used excessive force on a man with no prior convictions, leading to a $350,000 award for damages in the case, the Tribune reported.
Chicago police also moved late on Monday to discipline a second officer who had shot and killed an unarmed black woman in 2012, in another incident causing tensions between the department and minority communities. Superintendent Garry McCarthy recommended firing officer Dante Servin for the shooting of 22-year-old Rekia Boyd, saying Servin showed “incredibly poor judgment” even though a jury had acquitted him of involuntary manslaughter and other charges last April.
Mayor Rahm Emanuel called together a number of community leaders on Monday to appeal for help calming the emotions that have built up over the McDonald shooting.
Some attendees of the community meeting said afterward that city officials waited too long after McDonald was shot to get them involved.
“You had this tape for a year and you are only talking to us now because you need our help keeping things calm,” one of the ministers, Corey Brooks, said after the meeting.
Ira Acree, who described the meeting with Emanuel as “very tense, very contentious”, said the mayor expressed concerns about the prospect of any demonstrations getting out of control.
Another minister who attended, Jedidiah Brown, said emotions were running so high that there would be no stopping major protests once the video was released.
The fears of unrest stem from longstanding tensions between the Chicago police and minority communities, partly due to the department’s dogged reputation for brutality, particularly involving black residents. Dozens of men, mostly African American, said they were subjected to torture at the hands of a Chicago police squad headed by former commander Jon Burge from the 1970s to the early 1990s, and many spent years in prison. Burge was eventually convicted of lying about the torture and served four years in prison.
The two ministers said black people in the city are upset because the officer, though stripped of his police powers, has been assigned to desk duty and not fired.
“They had the opportunity to be a good example and a model across the country on how to improve police and community relations and they missed it,” Acree said.
The Chicago police department said placing an officer on desk duty after a shooting is standard procedure and that it is prohibited from doing anything more during the investigations.
The Associated Press contributed to this report
