Today, November 24th, 2015, Jason Van Dyke was charged with first-degree murder in the slaying of Laquan McDonald in Chicago, Illinois. We all should be charged for the same thing. I won’t argue with anyone who wants to call Jason Van Dyke a bad apple, but the problem is larger than that.
The problem–the problem that led to the death of Laquan Mcdonald–extends to Jason Van Dyke’s police department, whose officers allegedly went into a Burger King and erased the surveillance video. It extends to the Mayor’s office and to the State’s Attorney’s office, who were dilatory in bringing charges. It extends to our legislatures who have shielded our law enforcement officers with cloaks of qualified immunity, impunity, and legal invincibility. It extends to our courts, all the way up to the Supreme Court, for eviscerating the Fourth Amendment rights of the citizens.
The problem extends to each and every single one of us who wants to claim citizenship in a democratic republic.
Laquan McDonald is on all of us.
We are a society. We have a culture. We share a nation. We call ourselves the United States of America. We pride ourselves on our democratic ideals. We claim exceptionalism. Equal protection under the laws. A government of the people and by the people. Just as we as a nation cannot absolve ourselves for the slaughter of innocents overseas when we send our troops to war, we can’t abdicate our own responsibility for the death of Laquan McDonald or any of the others unjustly harassed, abused, or murdered in our name.
All it takes to file criminal charges in this country is probable cause, a bar so low in our courts that if it were not so tragic it would be laughable. It took over a year to charge Jason Van Dyke with first-degree murder despite the fact that clear video evidence showed far more than probable cause that he committed first-degree murder when he opened fire on a juvenile, a teenager who was moving away from him, a kid who made no threatening gestures toward Jason Van Dyke. He opened fire and he kept firing. Laquan McDonald fell to the ground and Jason Van Dyke kept firing.
It was memorialized in video. Evidence exists. Probable cause exists. As a society, we should be expected to seek justice for whomever was responsible for the death of Laquan McDonald. But we didn’t. We delayed, and justice delayed is justice denied.
It took 400 days to charge Van Dyke in the shooting of Laquan McDonald.
Jason Van Dyke gunned down Laquan McDonald on October 20th, 2014. A judge, in response to a journalist’s Freedom of Information Act request, ordered the video of the shooting released to the public by November 25th, 2015. 400 days.
400 days have gone by since Laquan McDonald breathed his last while he lay bleeding in the streets from sixteen bullet holes, with all the bullets being fired by one sworn to uphold the law and protect and serve the public.
400 days. The State’s Attorney, she’s an elected official. She’s a politician. The video had been requested by the public for a year. When the courts finally forced the city to release the video of the slaying as unrest continued to grow, she waited until the day the video was released to press charges.
#BlackLivesMatter –Laquan McDonald’s life mattered.
If Laquan McDonald had been arrested for shooting and killing someone, if the roles were reversed, he would have been put in jail and charged as soon as the courts were open for business. He would have been denied bail. He would have been assigned to an overworked public defender who could not possibly be expected to provide effective assistance of counsel with the immorally low funding and staffing in the public defender’s office. Laquan McDonald would either be coerced into pleading or he would have a mere formality of a trial before he was sent to prison or death row. No one would blink, because that is how our country operates. That is the status quo.
Instead, Jason Van Dyke is a white police officer who has a thin blue line to erase video tapes for him. He is a white police officer who has the strongest unions and political lobbies behind him. He is a white police officer who works in the executive branch of our government, hand in hand with the attorneys responsible for charging decisions and prosecutions. He is a white police officer who has 400 days to prepare a defense, to prepare his family, to practice those magic words, “I feared for my life.” He is a white police officer who may have never been charged in the first place if a journalist didn’t fight for that video to be released, who may have never been charged had that video not forced the hand of the State’s Attorney in her own self-interested political game.
We are all complicit; we are all responsible for change.
Plenty of people will spill words indicting Jason Van Dyke, but plenty of right-wing racists will instead blame the victim and say that if Laquan McDonald weren’t a “thug,” if he had just followed the directions of police, if he had just not committed any crimes in the first place, he would still be alive. Their logic will rest on the idea that anything short of unflinching obedience to the State, anything short of complete purity of spirit (and skin) deserves the sentence of death with no trial.
Plenty of people will blame a police culture that encourages officers to shoot first and ask questions later, yet plenty of others will write op-eds about a non-existent war on police.
Plenty of people will march in Laquan McDonald’s memory to honor him and to protest the sad truth that our government—and thus, the majority of our citizenry—cares less for the lives of black people and other people of color than it does for the white majority, yet many will point to the red herring of black on black violence.
Plenty of people will scream out in anguish because they aren’t heard when they say, “Black lives matter,” but—sadly—plenty of people will scream out in anger and denial to drown them out. Plenty of people will miss the point entirely; and to protect their own fragile psyches, to continue living in denial, or to maintain their own status quo, they will cry out, “All lives matter.”
It’s all so familiar, and it’s all so heartbreaking. So many words will be spilled about the blood we continue to spill, and most of them will be pointing the finger at someone else. So few will hold up a mirror and say, “How am I complicit?” The truth is, we are all to blame.
We live in a culture of fear in which we demonize “the other.” We live in a culture of violence in which we use guns in misguided efforts to solve or prevent our problems. We live in a culture in which we are at war with each other—black lives vs. blue lives, liberals vs. conservatives, extremist evangelicals vs. everyone, and the list goes on.
We live in a culture in which we voice outrage over the blood spilled in our streets, in our movie theaters, and in our schools; yet, we do nothing about it. We live in a culture in which we are all given one vote, we are all given voices, and we continue to either not use them or we waste them to maintain the status quo. The status quo is not acceptable.
My heart absolutely breaks for Laquan McDonald and for his family. And my heart breaks for us all.
Matthew J. Hefti is the author of A Ha
rd and Heavy Thing (Tyrus / F+W).
I find it hard to agree with your opinion, for a few reasons.
First, there isn’t any evidence, as far as I know, that this shooting had anything to do with race. I noticed that much of the media, particularly CNN and MSNBC, automatically made this into a "White police officer shoots Black teenager" situation, even though there isn’t any evidence that it was racially motivated. For whatever reasons, certain elements of society are quick to assume that this shooting, like others, was racially motivated since it involved a White police officer and a Black victim, in spite of the lack of evidence. I have read about plenty of shootings involving non-White police officers and un-armed White victims, but I have yet to see CNN display the banner "Black police officer shoots White teenager." I don’t believe that I ever will.
Second, we know that vast majority of violence is committed by people of the same race. You believe that pointing this out is a red herring. That’s fine, but it seems as if people with an anti-government or anti-police viewpoint jump on one interracial killing when there are dozens of intraracial killings for each interracial killing. This makes many Americans scratch their heads in confusion.
Third, Laquan McDonald made some really, really bad choices that night, which you gloss over. I don’t think it’s unfair to point out his behavior. I’m not saying he deserved to die for those bad choices, of course, or even that he was a bad person. Most teenagers make bad choices at some point. Laquan McDonald may have been a saint and he may have become President of the United States someday. No one knows.
What we do know is that he was high on PCP and was walking in the middle of a busy street brandishing a knife. Why was he holding a knife? Was he going to stab someone? What, if anything, was going through his head? Though he did not deserve to die, if Laquan wasn’t trolling a street with a knife, high on PCP, we can say with certainty that he would still be alive. I don’t think this is victim blaming…just common sense.
In my judgement, Laquan McDonald and Jason Van Dyke both made really bad choices that night and both will pay. I don’t believe race had anything to do with it, until evidence proves otherwise. Laquan paid the ultimate price and Jason Van Dyke has been charged with first degree murder. His life is really going to suck from this point forward.
Thanks for reading, Brian. I’d like to comment on your points one by one: First, It’s interesting that you want evidence that something is racially motivated, as if subconscious biases are nonexistent. Subconscious bias exists, and in many cases of police violence, you will not have an officer testify to what was in his heart or subconscious. However, more to the point, I’d like to point out that there are absolutely no claims in the piece that the shooting was racially motivated. Nor were there claims of guilt vs. justification. The furthest out on the limb the article goes is claiming probable cause, which exists in plenty.
Second: Pointing out inter vs intra racial killings is exactly a red herring. The article doesn’t jump on an individual shooting. It doesn’t analyze the actions of an individual officer–something it very well could have done with authority given my background in both use of force and law. Instead, it jumps on the city’s response to the shooting and our society’s continued apathy toward all forms of gun violence and divisiveness in the country. It talks about the shootings in our schools and movie theaters–the one obviously coming to mind committed by whites. It claims that we can’t abdicate our responsibility for ANY of those unjustly harassed, abused, or killed in our name, not just for the black lives that are abused. It just so happens black communities bear the brunt of police violence–proportionally–and that’s an empirical fact.
But that too is beside the point, the observations on race in the piece simply point out the systemic problems. Not a single sentence or paragraph passed judgments on the motivations of the officer. The systemic problems are real. The disparity between the way black defendants are treated in the court system versus the way this particular white police officer has been treated are very real. Your comment ignores that.
Third: The article doesn’t gloss over the poor choices by the victim–and yes, he’s a victim. It treats his poor choices for what they are: irrelevant. If he had not made those poor choices, would he be alive? Sure. But he’d also be alive if he stayed in bed smoking weed all day. The knife he was brandishing? We’re talking about a teenager with a pocket knife, who made no threatening gestures toward any of the officers, let alone the one who unloaded on him. If I shot some Taliban dude who was walking away from me and tried to claim he had opium in his system and a knife on his person, I’d have been court-martialed in an instant. McDonald’s poor choices in no way justify the way he was gunned down. And the PCP comment? Police did not know at the time that he had PCP in his bloodstream. It did not enter into the equation. Bringing it up now after the fact, when it played absolutely zero role in the officer’s choice to unload on a person not posing a threat is exactly what you say it’s not: distributing blame to the victim.
All that being said, though we disagree, I do appreciate that you took the time to both read and provide thoughtful comments to engage in the conversation.
Thanks Matthew. I believe the reason Blacks are subject to harsher penalties in the criminal justice system than other groups is simply because of economics. With the average net worth of a black household in America being well under $15,000, it’s difficult for black defendants to afford quality attorneys, unless they’re like O.J. Simpson. In our system, it appears that the rich usually get better treatment than the poor do. I think this is the main reason for the disparity.
I also believe the reason that so many Americans seem apathetic to gun violence is because there is no realistic solution that will work. Gun violence will be something that, unfortunately, we will have to live with if we want to continue to live in a free country.
Finally, I was interested to read that McDonald was raised by a single Mother. I remember reading a study from the Index of Leading Cultural Indicators that stated that 80% of all prison inmates were raised by single Mothers. It stuck with me because of how unbelievable it seemed. Do you think that this is true?
Do you find in your work that most of the defendants are products of single mothers?
Thanks Matthew.