The latest round of protests in Chicago over the police is, at face value, about the police shooting of 37-year-old Harith “Snoop” Augustus, a black barber working in the city’s South Shore neighborhood. But the demonstrations — and the anger that led to them — are really rooted in generations of criticisms against a police department that has been repeatedly found to be abusive of residents and racially discriminatory.

It’s not, then, just about this police shooting. It’s also a reaction to the 2014 police shooting of 17-year-old Laquan McDonald. It’s about the US Department of Justice investigation, released in 2017, which found that the Chicago Police Department repeatedly used excessive force and often treated people, particularly minorities, “as animals or subhuman.” And it’s the decades of incidents before that, including a scheme under which a police detective tortured hundreds of people to force confessions out of them.

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The Chicago Police Department “has relied on a two-tiered and unequal policing structure that has perpetuated systemic racial abuse and civil rights violations that remain ongoing today,” said Craig Futterman, a policing expert and professor at the University of Chicago School of Law. “That’s the context in which this shooting occurred.”

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