POLITICS AND THE LAQUAN McDONALD SHOOTING: THE TIMELINE DOESN’T FIT THE NARRATIVE

11/26/15

There are few things that virtually all parties involved, and not so involved, agree on concerning the Laquan McDonald case.  One is that it took an awfully long time for the tapes of young Mr. McDonald’s shooting to be made public.  Another is that it took a similarly long time for State’s Attorney Anita Alvarez, who can perhaps worst be described as an apolitical prosecutor, to bring criminal charges against Officer Jason Van Dyke, the shooter in the case.   

This being Chicago, where all things are political, the operative narrative is that the release of the tapes was delayed until after Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s reelection on April 7 and that prosecution was concurrently delayed because a criminal case would engender demands that the tape be released.   Further, the argument goes, Mr. McDonald’s family was paid a $5mm settlement, even before a civil case was filed, to keep them quiet and to therefore tamp down, or at least delay, demands for a criminal case and accompanying release of the tapes.

That story fits nicely with the Chicago political narrative, but there are problems with the timeline.   More than seven months have passed since Mayor Emanuel’s reelection.   The award to Mr. McDonald’s family was made one week AFTER the Mayor’s reelection.

Hmm…

If the sole motivation for keeping the tapes away from the public eye was to assure the Mayor’s reelection, why did seven months pass between the Mayor’s reelection and the release of the tapes?   If the aim of the secrecy surrounding the tapes was to keep the Mayor in office, why the need to pay the McDonald family hush money after the Mayor was reelected?   If the characteristically compliant with the pols Anita Alvarez delayed prosecution to do the Mayor’s bidding, why did she wait until more than seven months after his reelection to file criminal charges against Jason Van Dyke?  

Could it be that Ms. Alvarez’s explanation for the long delay in bringing criminal charges, i.e., that this is a complicated process that involves not only the State’s Attorney’s office but also the U.S. Attorney’s office and the police civilian review board, is true?   Could the City’s, and the Mayor’s, resistance to releasing the tape of the McDonald shooting have arisen from a genuine concern about possibly violent reaction by opportunist groups, who never miss an opportunity to exploit a tragedy to further their demands for “more resources” and/or just to cause trouble?

Yours truly is among the most reluctant to believe any politician, and especially to believe any politician around this town.   I am even more hesitant to exonerate a pol of any accused misdeeds; rather, I am usually one of the first to suggest such misbehavior by members of the political class.   But this neat narrative surrounding purely political motivation behind the release of the McDonald tapes doesn’t fit the timeline.   Either the politicians’ stories hold up here…or there is more going on.

See my two books, The Chairman, A Novel of Big City Politics and The Chairman’s Challenge, A Continuing Novel of Big City Politics, for further illumination on how things work in Chicago and Illinois politics.