The Chicago Police Department is seeking to fire the police officer who shot and killed 17-year-old Laquan McDonald, months after video showed that the account the officer, Jason Van Dyke, gave to justify the killing was wrong. Chicago Police Superintendent Eddie Johnson said the department will also try to fire four other officers accused of lying about the shooting.

McDonald didn't appear to pose a threat to the people around him as he haphazardly ran down a Chicago street, allegedly carrying a knife but keeping his distance from the police cars parked around him. But a video released November 24, 2015, more than a year after the October 20, 2014, incident, shows that a police officer nonetheless approached McDonald from at least 10 feet away and fired 16 shots, even after the black 17-year-old fell to the ground.

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Hours before the video was released to the public, Cook County State's Attorney Anita Alvarez announced she would press murder and misconduct charges against Van Dyke, the officer who shot and killed McDonald. But it took more than a year and a lengthy legal battle to get the video released, fostering suspicions that Chicago officials were engaging in a cover-up.

Now, more than nine months after the video was released, Johnson, head of the Chicago Police Department, filed administrative charges to try to get Van Dyke and four other officers fired for allegedly lying about what led up to the shooting. Whether the firings will actually happen will likely hinge on upcoming hearings by courts and the Chicago Police Board — a process that could last months.

For critics of the shooting, the firings could prove a big victory. The shooting briefly drew nationwide scrutiny, elevated by the Black Lives Matter movement that's protested racial disparities in police use of force following the shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, in August 2014. But unlike previous police shootings that drew national attention, the officer who actually shot McDonald and the others who tried to defend that officer are being held accountable for their misconduct and brutality.

Jason Van Dyke shot Laquan McDonald while the 17-year-old was on the ground

Warning: Graphic footage of a police shooting:

Only one police car's dashboard camera caught the McDonald shooting, according to the state's case against Van Dyke.

The grainy video shows McDonald running and then walking down the middle of a street. At one point, Van Dyke appears to open fire when McDonald is about 10 feet away. McDonald twirls around, apparently struck by bullets. He then falls to the ground, where he briefly moves before lying still. An officer then approaches the body and kicks away an object — allegedly a knife with a 3-inch blade that the teen held as he moved down the street and until he fell to a barrage of bullets.

According to the autopsy report, 16 bullets struck McDonald. The charging documents claim Van Dyke spent 14 or 15 seconds shooting McDonald. Van Dyke continued firing for 13 seconds while McDonald was on the ground, according to forensic evidence. Only two of the 16 shots could be definitively linked to when McDonald was standing, and Van Dyke fired all the shots.

The charging documents also claim that Van Dyke was on the scene for less than 30 seconds before he began firing.

"The officer's actions were not justified and were not a proper use of deadly force"

Police officers on the scene claimed that McDonald didn't respond to commands to drop the knife. He reportedly had a glazed look in his eyes, and an autopsy later found he had the drug PCP in his system.

But McDonald never seemed to threaten the officers, and in fact appeared to move away from them before Van Dyke opened fire. Still, Van Dyke's attorney told the New York Times that the officer feared for his safety. Van Dyke has pleaded not guilty.

The charges against Van Dyke were filed 13 months after he shot McDonald, and it's likely the video played some role in landing those charges. The video was released after months of pressure by activists and journalists, eventually pushing Cook County Judge Franklin Valderrama to order the city to release the footage by Wednesday.

Alvarez, the top prosecutor in Cook County, claimed she decided to charge Van Dyke weeks ago but was hoping to hold off on the announcement until federal authorities completed their part of the joint investigation into the shooting. She said she "moved up" the announcement after the judge's order to release the video, according to the Chicago Tribune.

"The officer's actions were not justified and were not a proper use of deadly force," Alvarez said.

As troubling as the video and charges are, they're not the first time Van Dyke came under criticism for his work as a police officer.

The Chicago Police Department and officer Jason Van Dyke have faced major complaints in the past

According to an Invisible Institute database, civilians filed at least 18 complaints against Van Dyke since 2001, although he was never disciplined for the complaints:

One complaint dealt with racial or ethnic verbal abuse.

Ten complaints were about arrest and lock-up procedures.

Three complaints alleged First Amendment violations and illegal arrests.

One complaint was search-related.

One complaint pertained to operation and personnel violations.

Two complaints noted other misconduct, but the details are unknown.

Still, these complaints are only the minimum. Alison Flowers from the Invisible Institute told ABC 7, "Our data tool does not encompass all of Van Dyke's complaints. There are still more that exist that we don't have access to, that we've not been provided by the city, because of the injunction by the Fraternal Order of Police."

The McDonald shooting is not the first time the Chicago Police Department has faced accusations of excessive use of force. This past year, the city announced it would pay $5.5 million to the victims of Chicago police commander Jon Burge, who allegedly tortured people into confessions. And a previous report from the American Civil Liberties Union of Illinois found big racial disparities in Chicago police stops — although black residents made up nearly 33 percent of the city's population, they accounted for 72 percent of stops in 2014, with such disparities even more pronounced in predominantly white neighborhoods.

With the McDonald shooting, many critics have accused Chicago officials of a cover-up. It took more than a year to release the footage. Official police reports indicate that every officer who filed an official report gave a very different description than what can be seen in the video. And, at the very least, the slow response to the shooting and the lack of public faith in the process exposed flaws in how Chicago investigates its own cops.

In response to waning public confidence, Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel fired former Chicago Police Superintendent Garry McCarthy, citing a lack of trust in police leadership due to the shooting. And the US Department of Justice on December 7 announced that it will investigate the Chicago Police Department for a pattern and practice of excessive use of force, particularly against racial minorities.

Most recently, the new Chicago police superintendent, Eddie Johnson, filed administrative charges to get Van Dyke and four other officers fired for lying about what led up to the shooting — in an apparent attempt to protect a fellow police officer.

Beyond the particulars of the specific charges and complaints against Van Dyke and the Chicago Police Department, critics of police use of force argue that the shooting of McDonald represents a much broader problem in the US: Black people are, compared with their white peers, disproportionately likely to be shot and killed by police.

Black people are much more likely to be killed by police than their white peers

An analysis of the available FBI data by Vox’s Dara Lind shows that US police kill black people at disproportionate rates: They accounted for 31 percent of police killing victims in 2012, even though they made up just 13 percent of the US population. Although the data is incomplete, since it’s based on voluntary reports from police agencies around the country, it highlights the vast disparities in how police use force.

Black teens were 21 times as likely as white teens to be shot and killed by police between 2010 and 2012, according to a ProPublica analysis of the FBI data. ProPublica’s Ryan Gabrielson, Ryann Grochowski Jones, and Eric Sagara reported: "One way of appreciating that stark disparity, ProPublica’s analysis shows, is to calculate how many more whites over those three years would have had to have been killed for them to have been at equal risk. The number is jarring — 185, more than one per week."

There have been several high-profile police killings since 2014 involving black suspects. In Baltimore, six police officers were indicted for the death of Freddie Gray while in police custody. In North Charleston, South Carolina, Michael Slager was charged with murder and fired from the police department after shooting Walter Scott, who was fleeing and unarmed at the time. In Ferguson, Darren Wilson killed unarmed 18-year-old Michael Brown. In New York City, NYPD officer Daniel Pantaleo killed Eric Garner by putting the unarmed 43-year-old black man in a chokehold.

BLACK TEENS WERE 21 TIMES AS LIKELY AS WHITE TEENS TO BE SHOT AND KILLED BY POLICE BETWEEN 2010 AND 2012

One possible explanation for the racial disparities: Police tend to patrol high-crime neighborhoods, which are disproportionately black. That means they're going to be generally more likely to initiate a policing action, from traffic stops to more serious arrests, against a black person who lives in these areas. And all of these policing actions carry a chance, however small, to escalate into a violent confrontation.

That's not to say that higher crime rates in black communities explain the entire racial disparity in police shootings. A 2015 study by researcher Cody Ross found, "There is no relationship between county-level racial bias in police shootings and crime rates (even race-specific crime rates), meaning that the racial bias observed in police shootings in this data set is not explainable as a response to local-level crime rates." That suggests something else — such as, potentially, racial bias — is going on.

One reason to believe racial bias is a factor: Studies show that officers are quicker to shoot black suspects in video game simulations. Josh Correll, a University of Colorado Boulder psychology professor who conducted the research, said it’s possible the bias could lead to even more skewed outcomes in the field. "In the very situation in which [officers] most need their training," he said, "we have some reason to believe that their training will be most likely to fail them."

Part of the solution to potential bias is better training that helps cops acknowledge and deal with their potential subconscious prejudices. But critics also argue that more accountability could help deter future brutality or excessive use of force, since it would make it clear that there are consequences to the misuse and abuse of police powers. Yet right now, lax legal standards make it difficult to legally punish individual police officers for use of force, even when it might be excessive.

Police only have to reasonably perceive a threat to justify shooting

Legally, what most matters in police shootings is whether police officers reasonably believed that their lives were in immediate danger, not whether the shooting victim actually posed a threat. So in the McDonald case, the question is whether Van Dyke thought McDonald reasonably posed an immediate threat to himself or others.

In the 1980s, a pair of Supreme Court decisions — Tennessee v. Garner and Graham v. Connor — set up a framework for determining when deadly force by cops is reasonable.

Constitutionally, "police officers are allowed to shoot under two circumstances," David Klinger, a University of Missouri St. Louis professor who studies use of force, told Vox’s Lind. The first circumstance is "to protect their life or the life of another innocent party" — what departments call the "defense-of-life" standard. The second circumstance is to prevent a suspect from escaping, but only if the officer has probable cause to think the suspect poses a dangerous threat to others.

The logic behind the second circumstance, Klinger said, comes from a Supreme Court decision called Tennessee v. Garner. That case involved a pair of police officers who shot a 15-year-old boy as he fled from a burglary. (He’d stolen $10 and a purse from a house.) The court ruled that cops couldn’t shoot every felon who tried to escape. But, as Klinger said, "they basically say that the job of a cop is to protect people from violence, and if you’ve got a violent person who’s fleeing, you can shoot them to stop their flight."

THE KEY TO BOTH OF THE LEGAL STANDARDS IS THAT IT DOESN’T MATTER WHETHER THERE IS AN ACTUAL THREAT WHEN FORCE IS USED

The key to both of the legal standards — defense of life and fleeing a violent felony — is that it doesn’t matter whether there is an actual threat when force is used. Instead, what matters is the officer’s "objectively reasonable" belief that there is a threat.

That standard comes from the other Supreme Court case that guides use-of-force decisions: Graham v. Connor. This was a civil lawsuit brought by a man who’d survived his encounter with police officers, but who’d been treated roughly, had his face shoved into the hood of a car, and broken his foot — all while he was suffering a diabetic attack.

The court didn’t rule on whether the officers’ treatment of him had been justified, but it did say that the officers couldn’t justify their conduct just based on whether their intentions were good. They had to demonstrate that their actions were "objectively reasonable," given the circumstances and compared to what other police officers might do.

What’s "objectively reasonable" changes as the circumstances change. "One can’t just say, 'Because I could use deadly force 10 seconds ago, that means I can use deadly force again now," Walter Katz, a California attorney who specializes in oversight of law enforcement agencies, said.

In general, officers are given lot of legal latitude to use force without fear of punishment. The intention behind these legal standards is to give police officers leeway to make split-second decisions to protect themselves and bystanders. And although critics argue that these legal standards give law enforcement a license to kill innocent or unarmed people, police officers say they are essential to their safety.

For some critics, the question isn’t what’s legally justified but rather what’s preventable. "We have to get beyond what is legal and start focusing on what is preventable. Most are preventable," Ronald Davis, a former police chief who heads the Justice Department’s Office of Community Oriented Policing Services, told the Washington Post. Police "need to stop chasing down suspects, hopping fences, and landing on top of someone with a gun," he added. "When they do that, they have no choice but to shoot."

Police rarely get prosecuted for shootings

Police are very rarely prosecuted for shootings — and not just because the law allows them wide latitude to use force on the job. Sometimes the investigations fall onto the same police department the officer is from, which creates major conflicts of interest. Other times the only available evidence comes from eyewitnesses, who may not be as trustworthy in the public eye as a police officer.

"There is a tendency to believe an officer over a civilian, in terms of credibility," David Rudovsky, a civil rights lawyer who co-wrote Prosecuting Misconduct: Law and Litigation, told Amanda Taub for Vox. "And when an officer is on trial, reasonable doubt has a lot of bite. A prosecutor needs a very strong case before a jury will say that somebody who we generally trust to protect us has so seriously crossed the line as to be subject to a conviction."

If police are charged, they’re very rarely convicted. The National Police Misconduct Reporting Project analyzed 3,238 criminal cases against police officers from April 2009 through December 2010. They found that only 33 percent were convicted, and only 36 percent of officers who were convicted ended up serving prison sentences. Both of those are about half the rate at which members of the public are convicted or incarcerated.

The statistics suggest that it would be a truly rare situation if the officer who shot and killed McDonald convicted of a crime. But the family does have the advantage of video footage, which has seemingly convinced several prosecutors — as was the case after the police shootings of Samuel DuBose in Cincinnati, Walter Scott in North Charleston, South Carolina, and now McDonald in Chicago — to press charges. It will now be up to a jury to decide whether the available evidence, including the video footage, is enough to convict Van Dyke of murder.

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