{"id":379672,"date":"2018-10-04T22:03:25","date_gmt":"2018-10-04T21:03:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/newswire\/how-many-other-laquan-macdonalds-are-there\/"},"modified":"2018-10-04T22:03:25","modified_gmt":"2018-10-04T21:03:25","slug":"how-many-other-laquan-macdonalds-are-there","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/newswire\/how-many-other-laquan-macdonalds-are-there\/","title":{"rendered":"\u2018How Many Other Laquan MacDonalds Are There?\u2019"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><em>Janine Jackson featured two archival interviews on Chicago police violence on the <a href=\"https:\/\/fair.org\/home\/hannah-hetzer-on-new-war-on-drugs-john-conroy-jamie-kalven-on-chicago-police-violence\/\">September 28, 2018, episode<\/a> of <strong>CounterSpin<\/strong>: a conversation with John Conroy on torturer Jon Burge, originally aired <a href=\"https:\/\/fair.org\/home\/hannah-hetzer-on-new-war-on-drugs-john-conroy-jamie-kalven-on-chicago-police-violence\/\">December 21, 2007<\/a>; and a talk with Jamie Kalven about police victim Laquan McDonald, from <a href=\"https:\/\/fair.org\/home\/jamie-kalven-on-the-laquan-mcdonald-cover-up\/\">December 11, 2015<\/a>. This is a lightly edited transcript.<\/em><\/p>\n<div id=\"wrapperMI_0\" class=\"wrap-mjp  \" style=\"padding:5px 0px 40px 0px;margin:0px;width:100%\">\n<div class=\"Eabove-mjp\" id=\"Eabove-mjp_0\"><\/div>\n<div class=\"subwrap-MI\">\n<div class=\"jp-innerwrap\">\n<div class=\"innerx\"><\/div>\n<div class=\"innerleft\"><\/div>\n<div class=\"innerright\"><\/div>\n<div class=\"innertab\"><\/div>\n<div class=\"interface-mjp verdana-mjp\" style=\"height:71px\" id=\"interfaceMI_0\">\n<div class=\"MI-image Himg right-mjp\" id=\"MI_image_0\" style=\"width:auto;height:71px;overflow:hidden\"><\/div>\n<div id=\"T_mp3j_0\" class=\"player-track-title left-mjp norm-mjp plain-mjp childNorm-mjp childPlain-mjp\"><\/div>\n<div class=\"bars_holder\">\n<div class=\"loadMI_mp3j\" id=\"load_mp3j_0\"><\/div>\n<div class=\"poscolMI_mp3j\" id=\"poscol_mp3j_0\"><\/div>\n<div class=\"posbarMI_mp3j\" id=\"posbar_mp3j_0\"><\/div>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<div id=\"P-Time-MI_0\" class=\"jp-play-time\"><\/div>\n<div id=\"T-Time-MI_0\" class=\"jp-total-time\"><\/div>\n<div id=\"statusMI_0\" class=\"statusMI\"><\/div>\n<div class=\"transport-MI\">\n<div class=\"play-mjp\" id=\"playpause_mp3j_0\">Play<\/div>\n<div class=\"stop-mjp\" id=\"stop_mp3j_0\">Stop<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<div class=\"buttons-wrap-mjp\" id=\"buttons-wrap-mjp_0\">\n<div class=\"mp3j-popout-MI\" id=\"lpp_mp3j_0\">pop out<\/div>\n<div id=\"download_mp3j_0\" class=\"dloadmp3-MI\"><\/div>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<div class=\"mjp-volwrap\">\n<div class=\"MIsliderVolume\" id=\"vol_mp3j_0\"><\/div>\n<div class=\"innerExt1\" id=\"innerExt1_0\"><\/div>\n<div class=\"innerExt2\" id=\"innerExt2_0\"><\/div>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<div class=\"Ebetween-mjp\" id=\"Ebetween-mjp_0\"><\/div>\n<div class=\"listwrap_mp3j\" id=\"L_mp3j_0\">\n<div class=\"wrapper-mjp\">\n<div class=\"playlist-colour\"><\/div>\n<div class=\"wrapper-mjp\">\n<ul class=\"ul-mjp darken1-mjp verdana-mjp med-mjp childNorm-mjp childPlain-mjp left-mjp\" id=\"UL_mp3j_0\">\n<li><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div><\/div>\n<div id=\"mp3j_finfo_0\" class=\"mp3j-finfo\">\n<div class=\"mp3j-finfo-sleeve\">\n<div id=\"mp3j_finfo_gif_0\" class=\"mp3j-finfo-gif\"><\/div>\n<div id=\"mp3j_finfo_txt_0\" class=\"mp3j-finfo-txt\"><\/div>\n<div class=\"mp3j-finfo-close\" id=\"mp3j_finfo_close_0\">X<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<div id=\"mp3j_dlf_0\" class=\"mp3j-dlframe\"><\/div>\n<div class=\"mp3j-nosolution\" id=\"mp3j_nosolution_0\"><\/div>\n<div class=\"Ebelow-mjp\" id=\"Ebelow-mjp_0\"><\/div>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<p>MP3jPLAYLISTS.MI_0 = [<br \/>\n\t{ name: &#8220;CounterSpin John Conroy Jamie Kalven Interviews &#8220;, formats: [&#8220;mp3&#8221;], mp3: &#8220;aHR0cDovL3d3dy5mYWlyLm9yZy9hdWRpby9jb3VudGVyc3Bpbi9Db3VudGVyU3BpbjE4MDkyOENvbnJveV9LYWx2ZW4ubXAz&#8221;, counterpart:&#8221;&#8221;, artist: &#8220;&#8221;, image: &#8220;true&#8221;, imgurl: &#8220;&#8221; 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 },<br \/>\n\t\t\tcssFontSize: { &#8220;title&#8221;: &#8220;16px&#8221;, &#8220;caption&#8221;: &#8220;11.2px&#8221;, &#8220;list&#8221;: &#8220;12px&#8221; },<br \/>\n\t\t\tclasses: { interface:&#8217; verdana-mjp&#8217;, title:&#8217; left-mjp norm-mjp plain-mjp childNorm-mjp childPlain-mjp&#8217;, image:&#8217; Himg right-mjp&#8217;, poscol:&#8221;, ul:&#8217; darken1-mjp verdana-mjp med-mjp childNorm-mjp childPlain-mjp left-mjp&#8217; }} };<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.fair.org\/audio\/counterspin\/CounterSpin180928Conroy_Kalven.mp3\"><strong>MP3 Link<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n<p><b>Janine Jackson:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400\"> The trial of former Chicago police officer Jason van Dyke <\/span><a href=\"http:\/\/www.chicagotribune.com\/news\/laquanmcdonald\/ct-van-dyke-trial-storygallery.html\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">continues<\/span><\/a><span style=\"font-weight: 400\"> this week\u2014Van Dyke <\/span><a href=\"http:\/\/www.chicagotribune.com\/news\/laquanmcdonald\/ct-graphics-laquan-mcdonald-officers-fired-timeline-htmlstory.html\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">charged<\/span><\/a><span style=\"font-weight: 400\"> with first-degree murder for <\/span><a href=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=JqCMMRoyPE4\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">killing<\/span><\/a><span style=\"font-weight: 400\"> Laquan McDonald in October of 2014, firing 16 shots into the 17-year-old, who was moving away from him. A former head of Chicago\u2019s Fraternal Order of Police, attending Van Dyke\u2019s trial, took a moment to remember another officer, Jon Burge, who <\/span><a href=\"https:\/\/www.apnews.com\/677d71113f73437f962390e77be5b827\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">died<\/span><\/a><span style=\"font-weight: 400\"> on September 19. \u00a0Former Commander Burge, with a gang of his cops known as the \u201cMidnight Crew,\u201d <\/span><a href=\"http:\/\/www.chicagotribune.com\/news\/ct-met-burge-trial-0629-20100628-story.html\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">terrorized<\/span><\/a><span style=\"font-weight: 400\"> communities of color and engaged in the systemic torture of more than 100 black men. <\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">At Van Dyke\u2019s trial, former FOP President Dean Angelo <\/span><a href=\"https:\/\/chicago.suntimes.com\/news\/former-chicago-police-department-commander-jon-burge-torture-cases-died-obituary\/\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">told<\/span><\/a><span style=\"font-weight: 400\"> the assembled media:<\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400\"><br \/>\n<\/span><\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">Jon Burge put a lot of bad guys in prison. You know, people picked a career apart, that was considered for a long time to be an honorable career, and a very effective career.<\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400\"><br \/>\n<\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">Media, too, were circumspect, with obituary headlines describing Burge as <\/span><a href=\"https:\/\/www.nbcchicago.com\/news\/local\/jon-burge-chicago-police-commander-torture-dies-493717741.html\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u201cdisgraced<\/span><\/a><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">,\u201d or suggesting he was \u201c<\/span><a href=\"https:\/\/chicago.cbslocal.com\/2018\/09\/19\/jon-burge-dead-former-police-commander-torture\/r-torture\/\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">linked<\/span><\/a><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u201d to torture, rather than guilty of it.<\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400\"><br \/>\n<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">Bringing attention to the murder of Laquan McDonald and horrific abuses of Jon Burge was the work not of the state, but of activists and community members, and both cases involved reporters\u2014not so much \u201cthe media,\u201d but individual and somewhat outsider reporters\u2014who played important roles in moving the stories toward daylight, if not yet accountability.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">With Burge, critical reporting was done by John Conroy, who worked the story for decades for the <\/span><b>Chicago Reader<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">. When <\/span><b>CounterSpin<\/b> <a href=\"https:\/\/fair.org\/counterspin\/josh-silver-on-fcc-ruling-john-conroy-on-chicago-police-torture\/\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">spoke<\/span><\/a><span style=\"font-weight: 400\"> with Conroy in December of 2007, the <\/span><b>Reader<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">, like many outlets, was in cost-cutting mode, and he had been laid off. We asked him how he came to the story.<\/span><\/p>\n<div id=\"attachment_8928224\" style=\"width: 360px\" class=\"wp-caption alignright\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\" wp-image-8928224\" src=\"https:\/\/fair.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/10\/John-Conroy.jpg\" alt=\"John Conroy\" width=\"350\" height=\"350\" \/><\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-caption-text\"><em>John Conroy: &#8220;In every society, there\u2019s a torturable class. And in Chicago, at that time, the torturable class was African-Americans.&#8221;<br \/><\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<p><b>John Conroy:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400\"> It began for me at the trial, a civil suit filed in federal court here in Chicago, by a man named Andrew Wilson, who was <\/span><a href=\"https:\/\/www.chicagoreader.com\/chicago\/the-police-torture-scandals-a-whos-who\/Content?oid=922414\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">suing<\/span><\/a><span style=\"font-weight: 400\"> some police officers, detectives and a high-ranking commander, as well as the city, claiming he had been tortured. And Andrew Wilson <\/span><a href=\"https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/1982\/02\/15\/us\/2-arrested-in-chicago-s-search-for-killers-of-police.html\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">had shot dead<\/span><\/a><span style=\"font-weight: 400\"> two police officers in 1982.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">And so when the trial began, it was clear he had really no chance. He was an African-American man who <\/span><a href=\"https:\/\/www.chicagoreader.com\/chicago\/the-persistence-of-andrew-wilson\/Content?oid=999832\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">had never learned to read<\/span><\/a><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">. He had a long career as an armed robber, and had committed other crimes. And he was testifying against a group of decorated policemen, one of them a Vietnam War hero. And they were very accustomed to testifying, while Wilson was not.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">I sat in on the trial, and during the course of it, some anonymous letters <\/span><a href=\"http:\/\/www.rrstar.com\/article\/20110129\/NEWS\/301299955\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">started arriving<\/span><\/a><span style=\"font-weight: 400\"> at the offices of Wilson\u2019s attorneys. And the letters came in police department envelopes, and they indicated that Wilson, who had claimed that he had been given electric shock, had indeed been given electric shock, and that the machines used had been used on other prisoners. <\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">And the letters directed the lawyers to talk to a man named Melvin Jones, who was then in Cook County Jail. And when they got to Jones, Jones said, \u201cOh yeah, the same thing happened to me.\u201d And it turned out it happened about five days before Wilson was arrested. And Jones said, \u201cI actually talked about this in 1983. You could pull the transcript.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">And so they pulled the transcript, and lo and behold, the lawyer <\/span><a href=\"https:\/\/www.huffingtonpost.com\/2010\/05\/27\/jon-burge-trial-police-to_n_592232.html\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">asked<\/span><\/a><span style=\"font-weight: 400\"> Jones, \u201cWhat did Jon Burge, the commander, say to you while this was going on?\u201d And he said:<\/span><\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u201cDid I know Satan and Cochise?\u201d And I said I knew them, but I didn\u2019t know them well, and Burge said, \u201cWell, they were crawling on the floor when I did this to them.\u201d <\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">So the lawyers then went and found Satan and Cochise. And sure enough, they knew all about this electric torture, and pointed them to other victims. And over the course of the next 15 to 20 years, a list was built up of more than 100 men who had been given electric shock, had been suffocated with plastic bags and typewriter covers, mock executions had been conducted, some had been beaten really severely, and a small group of detectives and a commander who had done it.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><b>JJ:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400\"> How, we asked, did the local media do on the case?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><b>JC:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400\"> Well, the local press is at a disadvantage, in that the reporters have to cover the whole Federal Building, so they run in and out of several trials, and there happened to be another trial going on at the time, of a sports agent, and this involved testimony of some celebrities. And as a result, I was really the only journalist who sat through the whole Andrew Wilson trial, and then sat through it again because it had ended in a mistrial. <\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">So the local press didn\u2019t notice that the police changed their defense from the first trial to the second. In the first trial, the police said Wilson couldn\u2019t have been burned on that radiator, because the radiator in that interrogation room never worked. And in the second trial, they said Wilson burned himself on that same radiator, and the reason why we know this is that we have a jailhouse informant. The jury didn\u2019t know that this guy had a long record of fraud, an international record of fraud and perjury, in addition to other crimes, but nonetheless, I was the only one who really spotted that.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">And so when my story came out, my editors thought that would be the end of it, that the dailies would run with this now. And nobody did.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">It did get noticed by the Office of Professional Standards, the police department body that investigates excessive force. And they reopened their investigation, and later cited my <\/span><a href=\"https:\/\/www.chicagoreader.com\/chicago\/house-of-screams\/Content?oid=875107\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">story<\/span><\/a><span style=\"font-weight: 400\"> as a starting point. <\/span><\/p>\n<div id=\"attachment_8928235\" style=\"width: 360px\" class=\"wp-caption alignright\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\" wp-image-8928235\" src=\"https:\/\/fair.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/10\/Jon-Burge.jpg\" alt=\"Jon Burge\" width=\"350\" height=\"522\" \/><\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-caption-text\"><em>Torturer Jon Burge<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">And in 1993, Burge was thrown off the force, but that was really treated as a one-day story: Burge <\/span><a href=\"http:\/\/www.chicagotribune.com\/news\/ct-xpm-1993-02-11-9303177820-story.html\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">thrown<\/span><\/a><span style=\"font-weight: 400\"> off the force over torture charges. And in part, it was because the Police Board issued a very vaguely worded statement, in which they never said Burge had tortured anybody. <\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">And so the next story I did had to do with the lack of concern about the victims, and it was called \u201c<\/span><a href=\"https:\/\/www.chicagoreader.com\/chicago\/town-without-pity\/Content?oid=889464\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">Town Without Pity<\/span><\/a><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">,\u201d and it was really pointed out, how the city, knowing that torture had occurred, was willing to look the other way, even though there were men on death row who would be executed unless somebody looked at their cases, and they were there on the basis of tortured confessions.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><b>JJ:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400\"> Was is it that reporters were just in some measure of disbelief about such horrible charges?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><b>JC:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400\"> I think that\u2019s the case. I think, too, that nobody cared about Andrew Wilson. He was a cop killer, and a lot of people thought, you know, he got what he deserved, if he got it. And I think that\u2019s one of the lessons here, that in every society, there\u2019s a torturable class. And in Chicago, at that time, the torturable class was African-Americans, most of them with criminal records.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><b>JJ:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400\"> That was John Conroy <\/span><a href=\"https:\/\/fair.org\/counterspin\/josh-silver-on-fcc-ruling-john-conroy-on-chicago-police-torture\/\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">speaking<\/span><\/a><span style=\"font-weight: 400\"> with <\/span><b>CounterSpin<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400\"> in 2007. His <\/span><a href=\"https:\/\/www.chicagoreader.com\/chicago\/police-torture-in-chicago-jon-burge-scandal-articles-by-john-conroy\/Content?oid=1210030\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">reporting on police torture in Chicago<\/span><\/a><span style=\"font-weight: 400\"> is still available at <\/span><a href=\"https:\/\/www.chicagoreader.com\/\"><b>ChicagoReader.com<\/b><\/a><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">Independent journalist Jamie Kalven\u2019s article for <\/span><b>Slate<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">, called \u201c<\/span><a href=\"http:\/\/www.slate.com\/articles\/news_and_politics\/politics\/2015\/02\/laquan_mcdonald_shooting_a_recently_obtained_autopsy_report_on_the_dead.html\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">Sixteen Shots<\/span><\/a><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">,\u201d testified against the tale Chicago law enforcement were telling about the killing of 17-year-old African-American Laquan McDonald. When <\/span><b>CounterSpin <\/b><a href=\"https:\/\/fair.org\/home\/the-tendency-is-to-just-publish-the-police-blotter\/\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">talked<\/span><\/a><span style=\"font-weight: 400\"> with Kalven in December 2015, he implicated media in the bigger picture of police abuse.<\/span><\/p>\n<div id=\"attachment_8928225\" style=\"width: 360px\" class=\"wp-caption alignright\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"wp-image-8928225 \" src=\"https:\/\/fair.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/10\/Jamie-Kalven.jpg\" alt=\"Jamie Kalven\" width=\"350\" height=\"350\" \/><\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-caption-text\"><em>Jamie Kalven: &#8220;To this day, even in this post-Ferguson era, the tendency is just to publish the police blotter.&#8221;<br \/><\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<p><b>Jamie Kalven:<\/b> <span style=\"font-weight: 400\">The media is part of the same machinery as the police department\u2019s false narrative about individual instances like the Laquan McDonald case, and larger macro-narrative about the state of the city. And so part of what is, I think, getting lost right now\u2014and understandably, given the extreme and egregious nature of what I think can only be called the execution of Laquan McDonald\u2014is that this is not a huge departure from the norm. I mean, this is the norm.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">So on October 20 of last year, the \u201cpolice-involved shooting,\u201d so-called, of a black teenager on the Southwest Side was treated by the media\u2014on the basis of information solely provided by the police department and a spokesperson for the Fraternal Order of Police, the police union\u2014as a kind of routine story of officer self-defense: Young man with knife lunges at officers, shot in the chest, dies some time later. Completely uncritical response. A police shooting\u2014almost invariably, about 80\u201385 percent of the time, of an African-American\u2014that\u2019s a story that recurs between 40 and 50 times a year in Chicago. <\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">We as journalists do not, unless there are exceptional circumstances, dig into the story to do the hard work on the scene, in the neighborhood, to find out what happened. To this day, even in this post-Ferguson era, the tendency is just to publish the police blotter.<\/span><\/p>\n<div id=\"attachment_8928181\" style=\"width: 360px\" class=\"wp-caption alignright\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\" wp-image-8928181\" src=\"https:\/\/fair.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/09\/Laquan-McDonald.jpg\" alt=\"Laquan McDonald\" width=\"350\" height=\"246\" \/><\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-caption-text\"><em>Shooting victim Laquan McDonald<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">I don\u2019t want to exclude myself from that indictment of the press. I was brought to the story, not by my own hunch or insight or intuition about what had happened here, but by a whistleblower, who reached out to a colleague of mine, Craig Futterman, a civil rights lawyer, and myself, with a tip, a couple of weeks after the shooting, to the effect that the facts were sharply at variance with the official account,<\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400\"> that there <\/span><a href=\"https:\/\/youtu.be\/ykkxV6oUCOs?t=14\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">was video<\/span><\/a><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">. And he was in a position close enough to the investigation to say that he was concerned that this was not going to be vigorously investigated.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><b>JJ:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400\"> We hear about the <\/span><a href=\"https:\/\/www.nbcchicago.com\/news\/local\/Chicago-Charges-Show-Challenge-of-Police-Code-of-Silence-431416063.html\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">police code of silence<\/span><\/a><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">. Kalven suggested an expansion of that idea.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><b>JK:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400\"> A lot of different things have entered into&#8230;you know, <\/span><a href=\"https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/interactive\/2014\/08\/13\/us\/ferguson-missouri-town-under-siege-after-police-shooting.html\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">Ferguson concerns<\/span><\/a><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">, the <\/span><a href=\"http:\/\/www.chicagotribune.com\/news\/local\/politics\/ct-met-chicago-mayor-rahm-emanuel-wont-run-for-reelection-20180904-story.html\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">mayor\u2019s re-election<\/span><\/a><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">, but also, I think, just the culture of how the police department responds. And I\u2019ve said this repeatedly in recent weeks, that what\u2019s really striking, if you look at just all the different acts\u2014including officers at the scene, and then how the investigative process was handled\u2014at every stage and at every level of the police department and the city, in response to this utterly appalling incident, the impulse, the default, just the cultural reflex, was to circle the wagons, and to double down on what they absolutely had to know was a false narrative.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">So there is a lot of talk in Chicago now about <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">conspiracy<\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400\"> and <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">cover-up<\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">, and I think those words have their place. But I think they\u2019re also misleading, and I think what we\u2019re confronting is something in some ways more disturbing, which is the culture. You know, we talk about the \u201ccode of silence,\u201d which is one of those really resonant phrases. And it\u2019s very evocative, because there is, in fact, a kind of coerced silence of police officers, who witness abuses but are intimidated into silence by fear of retaliation. I think there is also silence of victims, who know they won\u2019t be believed and won\u2019t be taken seriously, so the term makes some sense.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">But there\u2019s another sense in which it\u2019s really inapt, because what something like the Laquan McDonald incident reflects\u2014and I think it\u2019s an instance of a much, much broader phenomenon\u2014is an absolute, fierce effort to maintain narrative control. So the code of silence is a tool in the service of narrative control. And to come back to the press, that, I think, is where we have not been as effective as we might be in penetrating and piercing that dynamic, and it\u2019s critical to do so. I mean, how many other Laquan McDonalds are there?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span class=\"et_bloom_bottom_trigger\"><\/span><br \/>\nThis piece was reprinted by <a href=\"http:\/\/rinf.com\">RINF Alternative News<\/a> with permission from <a href=\"https:\/\/fair.org\/home\/how-many-other-laquan-macdonalds-are-there\/\">FAIR<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Janine Jackson featured two archival interviews on Chicago police violence on the September 28, 2018, episode of CounterSpin: a conversation with John Conroy on torturer Jon Burge, originally aired December 21, 2007; and a talk with Jamie Kalven about police victim Laquan McDonald, from December 11, 2015. This is a lightly edited transcript. Play Stop [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2521,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[519],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-379672","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-newswire"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/379672","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2521"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=379672"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/379672\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=379672"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=379672"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=379672"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}