Chicago Cops: “Compulsive Fabrication” of McDonald Shooting
There are times that I am tempted to go back to my previous gig of working for an organization that performed disciplinary investigations of law enforcement officers for various cities in and around Los Angeles.
And then I read stuff like this:
“The real issue here is, this terrible thing happened, how did our governmental institutions respond?” Kalven said. “And from everything we’ve learned, compulsively at every level, from the cops on the scene to the highest levels of government, they responded by circling the wagons and by fabricating a narrative that they knew was completely false.” To him this response is “part of a systemic problem” and preserves “the underlying conditions that allow abuse and shield abuse.”
In April, the Chicago Tribune revealed Van Dyke’s name and his history of civilian complaints—including several brutality complaints, one of which cost the city $500,000 in a civil lawsuit—none of which resulted in any disciplinary action. In May, Carol Marin reported that video from a security camera at a Burger King on the scene had apparently been deleted by police in the hours after the shooting.
“This case shows the operation of the code of silence in the Chicago Police Department,” said Futterman. “From the very start you have officers and detectives conspiring to cover up the story. The question is, why are they not being charged?”
Yeah, I’m a good Democrat. I tend to think that Rahm Emanuel has been handed a giant Shit Sandwich when it comes to the city government of Chicago. But this case, the pattern of conduct that has been revealed here, makes me think that maybe Rahm’s lost the thread. That he’s lost track of what it means to Be In Charge. You have to run things right, not just bend to expedience. Why?
Here we go:
Kalven calls Emanuel’s “reframing” of the narrative “essentially false.” He points out that “everything we know now, the city knew from Day One. They had the officers on the scene. They knew there were witnesses. They had the autopsy, they had the video…. They maintained a false narrative about those events, and they did it for a year, when it could have been corrected almost immediately….They spent a year stonewalling any calls for transparency, any information about the case.”