By Juliet Okwara
Literary Editor
It took 13 months for the Chicago Police Department to release the video of the shooting of Laquan McDonald, a 17 year old black teen shot 16 times over the course of 14 seconds, 13 of which he spent lying on the street. His shooter, Officer Jason Van Dyke has since been charged with first-degree murder, and his actions have fueled protests throughout Chicago.
The confrontation between McDonald and Van Dyke began after 9p.m. on Oct. 20, 2014 when McDonald was stopped by the police after report of someone breaking into vehicles on the Southwest Side.
But the reports of the officers present are at odds with the dashboard video. According to reports, Van Dyke told investigators that McDonald was “swinging the knife in an aggressive, exaggerated manner,” and raised the weapon above his shoulder from about 10 to 15 feet away. In the dashcam video, McDonald is clearly shown to be fleeing the scene, first running, then slowing to a slight jog and then walking before he was shot by Van Dyke. Was McDonald holding a knife: yes. Was he waving about in an “aggressive” manner that posed a threat to police officers present: no. And all five videos released show that there were at least eight police cars on the scene, a force that should have been sufficient enough to provide for the safety of the police officers and to detain McDonald without killing him. But it was not.
The problem in the shooting of McDonald is that it is merely a repeat of the deaths of Tamir Rice, Michael Brown, Eric Garner, and others who have suffered at the hands of police brutality. Black Americans do not have a problem with police officers doing their jobs. Each one of these individuals were in the wrong in one way or another and could have simply been restrained, but instead, an officer believed it was his right to take the life of another over a crime that has no reason to result in death.
When McDonald was shot, he was running away from the police officers, Rice was a 12 year old boy with a toy gun, Brown committed petty theft, and Garner was an unarmed black man selling loose cigarettes. All of these individuals committed minor crimes that could have easily been accounted for. Police officers are supposed to be executors of justice, not death.
To call these victims “thugs” simply dehumanizes them without paying attention to the real problem at hand. The question is not whether justice should be delivered; it’s whether justice must be delivered with a bullet for Black Americans.
This is not a new problem; Black Americans are not now suddenly getting mad, nor is this a problem caused by “race baiting politicians.” People are protesting McDonald’s death because police brutality drags Black Americans back to the Civil Rights Movement.
These protests are not to “end police,” they are to end the mass criminalization of black people and other minorities. The protesters out in Chicago are not thugs or hooligans, they are parents who do not want to live to see their children buried, black teens who have to think about what color hoodie they must buy so that they do not attract attention, and Americans who want to live up to the guarantee of equal protection under the law promised by the fourteenth amendment.
