Chicago officer accused of killing teen due in court

Less than two weeks later, his dash-cam footage of the McDonald shooting (which differs from the viral video we all saw) had no sound. A judge set the next hearing in Van Dyke’s case for March 23.

The Chicago police officer charged with murder in the shooting death of 17-year-old Laquan McDonald will return to court Friday morning. It was fixed another time, but on the night of the shooting, the system did not record any audio.

A report out of Chicago has found a pattern of intentional damage to the dash cams in squad cars by police officers, apparently to disable them.

It was not until McDonald was shot and killed by Officer Jason Van Dyke that Chicago PD recognized the widespread issue of officers intentionally tampering with dashcams and dashcam microphones.

Officers tampered with microphone antennas, stashed microphones in glove compartments and removed batteries to keep their devices from functioning properly, according to the DNAinfo Chicago report.

The announcement came the same day that the attorney for a white Chicago police officer accused of shooting a black teenager 16 times in 2014 said the officer and his family are receiving death threats.

The dashcam wiring system in the police vehicle that Van Dyke shared with his partner, Officer Joseph Walsh, was repaired on June 17, 2014, three months after it was reported broken.

They’ve since dug even deeper and obtained maintenance records for the police department’s squad cars, which show that there were long delays in fixing busted dashcams, including in the vehicle driven by officer Jason Van Dyke the night he shot and killed McDonald. This time it took until October 8 to fix what appeared to be intentional damage. On 30 other occasions, audio recording on dashcams had either not been turned on, or had been “intentionally defeated”, DNAinfo reported.

“If you have eight officers – like in the Laquan McDonald situation – all calling for a Taser and none of them have it, we have a problem”, Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel said in December. Since the closer scrutiny began last month, 20 officers and supervisors have faced discipline ranging from reprimands to a few days’ suspension, Guglielmi said, adding that “there is still work to do”.

A week later, as protests of police practices grew, Mayor Rahm Emanuel fired Police Superintendent Garry F. McCarthy, saying he “had become an issue rather than dealing with the issue”.

Now most interested parties, including lefty orgs like the ACLU, believe these police surveillance technologies will eventually help make police accountable, and more broadly, that they will lead to safer streets for everyone.

The department has taken a number of steps to try to regain the trust of the community.

A video of the shooting released in November sparked numerous protests and calls for Emanuel’s resignation. Now a Chicago Police Department audit reveals that numerous department’s dashboard cameras have been deliberately sabotaged.