October 20, 2014, a 17 year old black male was shot 16 times in the back while walking down the middle of the street in Chicago. Laquan McDonald was high on pcp and armed with a small pocket knife. He was causing a disturbance and acting erratically. He had slashed the tires of several vehicles, including a police vehicle.
McDonald was walking away from officers when Officer Jason Van Dyke shot McDonald in the back. No officer attempted to provide medical assistance to McDonald as he died in the street. Chicago police released the results of an internal investigation that determined that Van Dyke had acted appropriately when he shot McDonald in the back.
Mayor Rahm Emanuel fired police chief Gary McCarthy, widely regarded as the top cop in America prior to this event.
Chicago erupted in protest, and what resonated the loudest was the silence of the Chicago officials who refused to release any dash camera footage for thirteen months before finally relenting and then released the video showing the murder of McDonald.
Prosecutor Anita Alvarez stalled on the investigation for over 400 days before charging officer Van Dyke with the murder of the seventeen year old. In June of 2017, three officers were indicted of conspiracy and obstruction of justice for their tampering of the investigation. In October of 2018, four years after the shooting, Van Dyke was found guilty of sixteen counts of aggravated assault and found guilty of second degree murder.
Prosecutor Alvarez lost her bid for re-election and Mayor Rahm Emanuel has announced he will not run for re-election in the upcoming election. Emanuel was expected to run for President after his tenure in Chicago, which now seems very unlikely.
As for the investigation, Van Dyke claimed that McDonald lunges at him with the knife. After the video clearly showed that was false, he changed his defense, claiming that he feared that McDonald would charge at him with the knife, or throw it. He also cited a 2012 report that there were knives capable of firing a bullet. Van Dyke had only been on scene for 30 seconds before firing, despite 8 officers being in close proximity that did not fire, nor feel the need to fire their weapons. Officers on scene had called for a taser, or other less lethal options due to the fact that McDonald had not made any active attempts to harm officers with the knife.
Now, here is where I will condemn the response of American police officers to subjects armed with knives. Often cited, the “twenty one foot rule” has been used to justify officers using lethal force against knife wielding subjects. The rule states that a subject armed with a knife can close a distance of twenty one feet on an officer in seconds. Studies have shown that once an officer perceives a threat, it will take an average of 1.5 seconds to react to the threat.
Where this rule originated from was a seminar in which the question was posed “what is the minimum safe distance when dealing with a subject armed with a knife?” One of the instructors replied “I don’t know, 21 feet” which launched a series of demonstrations in which a subject could close that distance very quickly. Soon, that “rule” was falsely interpreted to mean that an officer is justified in using lethal force on a subject armed with a knife if they are within that distance.
Further studies refined the 21 foot rule to state that an officer that has their firearm out of the holster, should maintain a distance of at least 21 feet when facing a subject armed with a knife or blunt instrument, or seek cover or a barrier between the officer and that subject.
The 21 foot rule, and American police response to knife wielding subjects has been further shown to be excessive when looking at how other countries’ police forces deal with the same threat. The police in the UK have perfected their response by using less lethal force, shields, and batons. The UK police only killed five subjects in a ten year period. Granted, the police in the UK do not face the same threat as American police when it comes to firearms, but the rate that American police use lethal force on knife wielding subjects is much greater than the police in the UK.
Concerning the McDonald incident, the actions of officer Van Dyke were clearly excessive, in that he shot McDonald in the back, as he was walking away from Van Dyke and other officers. At the time of the shooting, McDonald posed no immediate threat to the officers, or the general public. The argument that he could have run away from officers and possibly attacked some random citizen fall into what I call the “what if “ defense. The “what if” defense is invalid because it deals in uncertainty and not in known facts.
For example, regarding police pursuits(maybe a future subject?) an officer that attempts to stop a vehicle for running a stop sign can only use the facts they have at hand-that a subject failed to stop at a stop sign. They can not use, for example, an argument such as “what if they have a body in the trunk,” which is why many pursuits are now called off because of the extreme risk pursuits cause to the general public, the officers, and yes, the suspect.
So in the McDonald case, an argument that McDonald “could charge; could run; could throw the knife” are invalid. You can only deal with what threat or action the subject is doing at that moment, not what they could do in the future. If he was armed with a firearm, it is a different situation because a firearm has the range and the lethality that a small knife does not.
In my opinion, officers in the McDonald case should have contained the subject, waited for less lethal options, such as a taser or bean bag rounds, and followed at a distance until they had other options than lethal force. Also, when dealing with a subject with a knife, an officer can not close the distance and then claim that they were in fear, or at risk of serious harm or death.
The McDonald case is an example of a bad shoot by police, and horrible mismanagement of both the investigation, and the handling of the media and freedom of information(FOIA) requests, in not releasing the video for 13 months, which reeks of a cover-up, which it was.
The next shooting we will look at, is what myself, the department, and a jury of the officer’s peers deemed a good shooting.
On August 13, 2016, officers Dominique Heaggan-Brown(DHB-come on, that is a damn long name), and