Roundup: Craig Futterman on the Laquan McDonald Shooting Video
On Tuesday, November 24, the Chicago Police Department released the long-awaited dashcam video from the shooting death of Laquan McDonald. Craig Futterman, Clinical Professor of Law and director of the Civil Rights and Police Accountability Project, was instrumental in that release through his successful FOIA request. Professor Futterman and the Invisible Institute recently released the Citizens Police Data Project, which provides a powerful tool to research several years of complaints against Chicago police officers. Professor Futterman has been interviewed and quoted in many stories over the past days and months involving the Laquan McDonald case.
AP, "Chicago Teen's Death Shines Light on Police Code of Silence":
"If they are not going to analyze officers' reports and compare them to objective evidence like the video, why would the officers ever stop lying?" asked Craig Futterman, a University of Chicago law professor who helped force the city to release the video.
Of the eight officers, six said they did not see who fired, and three depicted McDonald as more threatening than he appeared. One claimed the teen tried to get up with a knife still in his hand. The footage clearly showed him falling down and lying motionless on the pavement.
Craig Futterman, a civil rights attorney and professor at University of Chicago Law School, called the case “a powerful example of State’s Attorney Alvarez’s refusal to address systemic perjury by Chicago police.”
“It is a systematic problem,” says Craig Futterman, a University of Chicago Law School professor and civil rights attorney. “When there’s a police shooting, or when there’s an allegation of misconduct or brutality, the institutional response is to circle the wagons, denial, and cover up. And it’s throughout the entire organization. It’s not just sort of a code of silence” amongst officers but “really a phenomenon of narrative control and lying” from the top down.
CNN:
Futterman played a significant role in the release of the McDonald dashboard camera footage.
He was among the first people outside the police department to learn of the video. The professor told CNN that it was a law enforcement official who contacted him.
This person was "shocked, and was afraid that this would be buried," he said. "This person put their career on the line [to speak to me], but I believe their sentiments are represented by a silent majority of officers. The vast majority of officers hate this, what is done by a small percent of officers. These good officers feel disempowered to speak up or do anything about it."
WBEZ:
Craig Futterman is a clinical law professor at the University of Chicago. He initially learned about the shooting of Laquan McDonald from a police blotter.
“Like all too many people, my eyes glazed over because it was something that I saw all the time,” he said.]
But later, a confidential source tipped him off to the existence of a dashcam video showing the fatal shooting of McDonald by police.
“They told me it looked like nothing short of an execution,” he said.
The year-long battle over the Laquan McDonald video began just a couple of weeks after the shooting when a confidential whistleblower within Chicago law enforcement contacted Craig Futterman, a clinical law professor at the University of Chicago. The source said that he had seen the video, had been horrified by what it showed, which looked to the source like an execution. The source added that he was deeply concerned that the evidence would be “buried” in a cover-up.
Futterman and his colleague Jamie Kalven then began a struggle with the city authorities to find out what had happened in the shooting. It was a surreal experience that brought them face to face with the bureaucratic intransigence of Chicago.
“It felt like going up against Chicago’s blue code of silence, trying to scale a wall,” he said.
CNN:
The mayor, Futterman said, is following a familiar script in Chicago politics and police scandals: Heads roll, a blue-ribbon panel investigates and then nothing changes.
"This is a real test for the mayor now. He has failed the test when it comes to police accountability, but right now is one of these political moments," Futterman told CNN. "He has to think about what his legacy is and what he wants his legacy to be: Does he want to be known possibly as the person who helped to change police in Chicago and bring in real police reform?"
NPR interview with Linda Wertheimer after the video release
Interview on All In with Chris Hayes after the video release
Interview with The Last Word with Lawrence O'Donnell on MSNBC after the video release
CBS Chicago, "Decades Of Complaints Against Chicago Cops Are On The Verge Of Being Destroyed"
Two of the many individuals who’ve fought for police complaint records to become public include journalist Jamie Kalven and civil rights lawyer Craig Futterman, who have spent more than a decade attempting to obtain this data. The city, credit where credit is due, gave up their fight against releasing the data last year. It’s the city of Chicago who is currently in court fighting to make the complaint data accessible, with FOP arguing that most of the data should be destroyed.
For Kalven and Futterman, police complaint data is integral in the fight for justice for police abuse victims. One such victim, whose lawsuit against the city helped some of the data become public, is Diane Bond. In 2003, according to a lawsuit against the city, Bond alleged that officers “sexually, verbally and physically assaulted her.”
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Bond’s lawsuit is one of two that led to Kalven using the Freedom of Information Act to obtain a list of the officers with the most complaints between 2001 and 2008. These attempts at making police complaint data public through FOIA resulted in Kalven v. City of Chicago, leading to the Supreme Court of Illinois to conclude that the police misconduct records should be released to the public.
Washington Post, "The Alarming Numbers on Race and Police Misconduct in Chicago"
"The vast majority of folks that believe they've been abused don't file complaints," said Craig Futterman, an attorney who belongs to a legal clinic at the University of Chicago. He and the Invisible Institute, a journalistic production company, successfully sued the city for the release of the data.
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For Futterman, though, the police's best investigative effort isn't always enough. He noted that law enforcement's failure to gather evidence against officers when black residents complain of misconduct might mean that police are better sourced and better trusted in white neighborhoods.
In some neighborhoods, "people are frightened even by having to give names and addresses and things like that," Futterman said. "Part of an investigator's success is securing cooperation, too."
The Atlantic, "The Corrupt System That Killed Laquan McDonald":
Two figures instrumental in fighting for sunlight in the Laquan McDonald shooting, Craig Futterman of the University of Chicago Law School and Jamie Kalven of the Invisible Institute, wrote last December about an alarming pattern in Chicago:
A black man is shot by a Chicago police officer. Police sources at the scene say the shooting was justified. The Independent Police Review Authority says it is investigating the incident. Then silence. After a year or two, IPRA issues a report confirming that the shooting was indeed justified. This is in sharp contrast to how the CPD handles high-profile cases of incidents of violence involving civilians. In such cases, the department recognizes and accommodates the public's interest in timely information. Surely, the public interest is at least as strong, if not stronger, when citizens are shot by the police.
They went on to explain that “in Kalven v. Chicago, the Illinois Appellate Court held that documents bearing on allegations of police abuse are public information,” and that the Emanuel administration adopted a new transparency policy as a result—but that the Kalven decision “is limited to closed police misconduct cases; it doesn’t cover ongoing investigations,” even though public interest in police-killing investigations “is far more intense at the time of the shooting than one or two years later when the case is closed and public attention has turned elsewhere.”
US News and World Report, "After Police Shooting in Chicago, Calls for Emanuel to Resign" (Futterman interviewed throughout article)
CBC News, "Laquan McDonald Case: 5 Questions in the Fatal Chicago Police Shooting" (Futterman interviewed throughout)
The police department and the police union both quickly put out stories about how McDonald continued to approach the officer and therefore was shot. The story would have disappeared had it not been for an anonymous city employee telling freelance journalist Jamie Kalven and University of Chicago civil rights attorney Craig Futterman that video would tell a very different story.
Craig Futterman, an attorney for freelance journalist Brandon Smith, said while the video will certainly anger people, the Police Department's fight to keep the video from public view will upset them more.
Mr. Van Dyke appears to be the first police officer who has been charged in an on-duty shooting in Chicago—a city that for decades has averaged a shooting by police every week, said Craig Futterman, a professor of law at the University of Chicago who focuses on civil rights and police accountability.
Twenty misconduct complaints were made against Van Dyke in the past four and a half years — but none led to disciplinary action from the Chicago Police Department. according to research by Craig Futterman, a University of Chicago law professor and expert on police accountability issues.
“The Chicago Police Department refuses to look at potential patterns of misconduct complaints when investigating police misconduct,” Futterman said. “If the department did look at these patterns when investigating police abuse, there is a great chance right now that 17-year-old boy would still be alive.”
He believes Van Dyke is the first Chicago police officer to be criminally charged for an on-duty shooting.
In March, Futterman told the Chicago Daily Law Bulletin:
“In a world where an incident like (McDonald) happens and the public statements are ‘Deny, deny, deny,’ and then close off and circle the wagons, and then a code of silence and an exoneration at the end of the day — in that system, you cannot create public trust,” he said. “It’s just that simple.”
Trust can be built, however, through transparency and honesty, he said.
“It means (saying to) that mom, who lost a son: ‘We’re not going to hide from you the person who took your son’s life. We’re not going to hide from the public. Just like we wouldn’t hide from the public a person who has been charged with or accused of a crime,’” he said.
“That’s the only way. That’s how you get trust.”