[Chicago officials] prevented the public from viewing crucial incriminating evidence [in the first-degree murder of 17-year-old Laquan McDonald] — first one police car’s dashboard camera video; now, we learn, five such videos in total. And these senior officials turned a blind eye to the fact that 86 minutes of other video surveillance footage of the crime scene was unaccountably missing.
The Cook County prosecutor, Anita Alvarez, must have had probable cause to indict Officer [Jason] Van Dyke for the Oct. 20, 2014, shooting death of Mr. McDonald the moment she viewed the police dash-cam video, after her office received it two weeks later.
[...]
But the timing, in late 2014, was not good.
[...]
The video of a police shooting like this in Chicago could have buried [Rahm] Emanuel’s chances for re-election.
[...]
And so the wheels of justice virtually ground to a halt. Mayor Emanuel refused to make the dash-cam video public, going to court to prevent its release.
[...]
Then the city waited until April 15 — one week after Mr. Emanuel was re-elected — to get final approval of a pre-emptive $5 million settlement with Mr. McDonald’s family, a settlement that had been substantially agreed upon weeks earlier. Still, the city’s lawyers made sure to include a clause that kept the dash-cam video confidential.
[...]The city spent thousands of dollars in legal expenses to keep the video under wraps. And it would probably have continued to do so, had Judge Franklin Valderrama of the Cook County Circuit Court not ordered its release.
NYT
...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.
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