A demonstration is called for 11:00 a.m. today in downtown Chicago. Marchers meet at the corner of Michigan Avenue and Wacker Drive, and will move north through the heart of Chicago’s most expensive, tourist-visited and suburbanite-choked shopping district: the Magnificent Mile. People are protesting the almost cinematically horrible way the City of Chicago handled Chicago Officer Jason Van Dyke’s killing of Laquan McDonald in October 2014. After the officer fired at a teenager who stood several feet away holding a knife, the boy dropped to the ground and the officer continued to fire for a total of 16 shots. For a year since, the police department refused to release video of the shooting, didn’t charge Van Dyke or fire him and wouldn’t release any details of an investigation into the murder. A Burger King near the site of the killing had a 24-hour surveillance camera that caught the act, but after the police viewed that video soon after the shooting, it somehow became erased.
Van Dyke has a long record of citizen complaints against him, several for physical violence, yet only after a judge ordered the police department to release the video to the public was Van Dyke charged with first degree murder. The Chicago police department and mayor’s office have a lot to answer for. I’ll be there at 11:00 a.m.