

The video shows a suspect walking away from the police when an officer drives onto the scene and immediately opens fire. Moments later, the 17-year-old Laquan McDonald is dead — shot 16 times. On the face of it, this is yet another case of unreasonable use of force by police against black men: Ferguson, North Charleston, Minneapolis and now Chicago.

The difference here is that the video footage was kept under wraps for over a year. Such secrecy has sparked calls for Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel and Cook County State’s Attorney Anita Alvarez to resign.

After sketching an outline of what it calls a “cover-up,” The New York Times recently editorialized that while it long appeared Emanuel’s administration was going to succeed in withholding dashcam footage of the shooting, “Fortunately, a journalist working the case sued for release of the video.”

That journalist, a freelancer named Brandon Smith, was, until recently, little-known outside of Chicago activist circles. His work has now led to murder charges against the officer involved in the shooting, as well as the resignation of the Chicago police chief, Gary McCarthy.

Accustomed to working with progressive, independent media outlets such as In These Times and Chicago Reader, Smith has had to adjust to his new role in the public eye in the wake of the video’s release. “I’ve been fielding interview requests full time for the past week-and-a-half,” he says in a recent phone interview.

He explained the media’s interest in the story as a combination of two factors:

“There’s a police brutality angle, certainly,” Smith states. “But there’s also a media story, one where I had to fight for transparency and the city was fighting back.”

The Windy City is home to two of the biggest daily newspapers in the country: the Sun-Times and the Tribune. But both have sustained major cutbacks in staffing in recent years, reflecting a national trend in the daily newspaper business.

What does it say that it was left to a freelancer to uncover this story? Smith is deliberate in his answer, careful to point out that there are still good reporters at newspapers like the Tribune. However, he notes: “They’ve cut their staff down to a shadow of what it used to be. I’ve seen some dogged reporting by them. But maybe the question is: Why don’t they do it always?”

The Chicago papers still have a substantial budget for investigative reporting, especially compared to freelancers like Smith. “They have reporters who cover the story,” he says, “and they submitted FOIA requests like I did.”

Indeed, before Smith came along, the Chicago police had fielded — and refused — at least 15 other FOIA requests for the dashcam footage from other media outlets. “The only difference,” he suggests, “seems to be that their executives didn’t approve of a lawsuit. Why? I have no idea.”

While his freelance work doesn’t exactly afford him a steady income, the independence permitted him to pursue a lawsuit after the police initially denied his request for the video. He was aided in the struggle by Craig Futterman, a lawyer and founder of the Civil Rights and Police Accountability Project at the University of Chicago; and Jamie Kelvin, another independent journalist and founder of the nonprofit Invisible Institute.

In an NPR interview, Futterman discussed the parts of this story that are still obscure. Take, for instance, the missing 80 minutes of surveillance video recorded by cameras at a nearby Burger King. Alvarez, the Cook County attorney, says she found no evidence of tampering while the Burger King manager on duty that night has accused the police of deleting the footage.

In the same interview, Futterman mentions a witness to the shooting who said she was taken from the scene by police and browbeaten into not talking about what she saw.

To anyone following national stories on policing, that witness’s claim sounds eerily familiar. There is the couple in Greensboro, North Carolina, who claim that for weeks after filing a police brutality complaint, officers sat in a squad car parked in front of their home. An eyewitness to a police killing in Albuquerque, New Mexico, also reported a police car parked in front of her home for weeks on end. And Black Lives Matter protesters in Chicago and New York have been targets of surveillance by law enforcement officials, according to reporting by the Chicago Sun-Times, and muckraking website The Intercept.

Are police trying to silence their critics?

“Yeah, I think that’s more than safe to say,” Smith says. He notes that there were other witnesses to the Laquan McDonald shooting who were asked to leave the scene by police. “When I continue my court case I’m going to figure out how the police interacted with these witnesses, taking sworn testimony from every officer who was there that night.”

Read any of the media coverage of the Laquan McDonald shooting, and you will find mention of the Chicago Police Department’s long history of abuse. Agents working within the Chicago Police Department’s notorious “Red Squad” spent decades spying on the political left. In 1990, a local journalist broke the story of a Chicago precinct commander who had tortured more than 100 African-American suspects over the course of two decades.

Today, the Chicago Police Department can claim it is accountable to the Independent Police Review Authority. Oversight, however, is notoriously lax. Out of more than 400 officer-involved shootings since 2007, the board’s investigations found only a single case to be “unjustified.” Smith calls this “a startling ratio.”

Given this history of police abuse, I wanted to know whether Smith thought the Laquan McDonald case had a chance to spark any lasting change in police culture.

He told me that this is hard to predict, noting that it would depend on what activists and civil rights leaders demand from their elected officials.

“A lot of the final outcome,” he concludes, “will also depend on how hard the national and local media stick with the story.”