Before Laquan McDonald, a Chicago Police Shooting with No Video

There was something sadly familiar about the video released last week of a police officer in Chicago shooting a seventeen-year-old, Laquan McDonald, sixteen times. After the city’s lawyers viewed the video, earlier this year, they offered McDonald’s family five million dollars, before the family had even filed a lawsuit. In the past ten years, the city has paid five hundred and twenty-one million dollars in alleged police-misconduct cases, according to a study by the Better Government Association, a local non-profit watchdog group. For many, these settlements are the only acknowledgement that officers might have acted unprofessionally, or, worse yet, outside of the law. After the video emerged, last week, I spoke with one of the many families who have received settlements from the city. I met Dana Cross while researching a book on the city’s street violence. “They paid us off,” she told me. “I just want those police officers off the street. If they did it to my baby, they’ll do it again.”