In early November, 2014, Craig Futterman, a law professor at the University of Chicago, got a call from someone who worked in law enforcement in that city. The caller told Futterman about a squad-car dashboard-camera video from a few weeks earlier, which showed a police officer shooting to death a seventeen-year-old boy named Laquan McDonald. According to the source, the video was at striking odds with the version of the incident that the Chicago Police Department had presented. In that account, the officer, Jason Van Dyke, acted in self-defense: McDonald was out of control and menacing him with a knife, so he shot him once, in the chest. But the source, describing the video frame by frame, evoked what sounded to Futterman like “an execution.”

Fifteen years ago, Futterman founded a legal clinic at the university focussed on civil rights and police accountability. He and his frequent collaborator, Jamie Kalven, who runs a nonprofit journalism project called the Invisible Institute, interviewed witnesses, and they corroborated what the caller had said. Last December, Futterman and Kalven called on the C.P.D. to release the video. Soon afterward, Kalven, through a Freedom of Information Act request, obtained the autopsy report. It showed that McDonald, a ward of the state who had “Good Son” tattooed on one hand, had been shot sixteen times.

For months, the C.P.D. refused to release the video. There were protests. Then, last summer, Brandon Smith, a freelance journalist, sued the department to make the footage public, and a judge ruled in his favor. On November 24th, the day Officer Van Dyke was charged with first-degree murder, and thirteen months after the shooting, the police department finally released the video. It shows McDonald trotting briskly away from officers as they approach, not menacing them. When Van Dyke’s first shots hit him, he spins and drops to the ground. An officer kicks a knife away. No one is seen offering first aid. Last week, the Justice Department announced that it is opening a wide-ranging investigation into the policies and practices of the Chicago police. Mayor Rahm Emanuel, who resisted making the video public, and who criticized the Justice Department investigation as “misguided,” said last Wednesday that he now welcomes it, and apologized for McDonald’s death.

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