Craig Futterman on the Laquan McDonald Case and the Chicago Police Department's "Code of Silence"

Did Chicago police cover up the Laquan McDonald shooting? A judge is about to decide.

Craig Futterman, a policing expert and professor at the University of Chicago School of Law, said the McDonald case showed “the anatomy of the code of silence in action.”

“You had a scene where officers where doing things largely right,” Futterman said in a December interview. Even so, “everyone falls in line after Jason Van Dyke fires those shots.”

Conspiracy charges weren’t filed until 2017 against three of the officers who backed Van Dyke’s story: Thomas Gaffney, one of the first officers to cross paths with McDonald that night; Joseph Walsh, Van Dyke’s partner who witnessed the McDonald shooting; and David March, a detective tasked with investigating the shooting for the police department.

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