When we interviewed the head of the Chicago police union in 2016 about #LaquanMcDonald we asked about a police code of silence. His response: “There’s a code of silence everywhere” and then he brought up churches covering up child sex abuse
That comment by Dean Angelo made it into the @TheJusticeDept scathing report on the Chicago Police Department
Our 2016 @AJFaultLines episode “The Contract” looked at how Chicago’s police union contract gave officers special privileges when they were being investigated in a shooting: police are given 24 hours to “cool off” before investigators can interview them.
Critics say police union contracts build in special protections for officers that create a culture of impunity, giving officers time to manipulate facts. In the #LaquanMcDonald case, the official police story was proven false once the video came out.
In the #LaquanMcDonald case, officers allegedly intimidated witnesses, destroyed evidence, and filed false police reports claiming he attacked them. But video of the incident told a different story: The teenager was walking away as police officer Jason Van Dyke shot him 16 times.
Adam Gross, a member of a task force appointed by the mayor to examine Chicago’s police union contract told us: “We went into the process thinking the code of silence was just this unwritten agreement among police officers to protect one another.”
“And what we found was that the contract itself institutionalises these private understandings among police officers that make it harder to identify and root out bad behaviour.”
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