He has pleaded not guilty.
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On 30 occasions, technicians who downloaded dashcam videos found evidence that audio recording systems either had not been activated or were “intentionally defeated” by police personnel, the records show.
After 17-year-old Laquan McDonald was shot 16 times by Chicago Police officer Jason Van Dyke in October 2014, the dashcam video of the shooting went viral.
The report says the records also show that a day after the device was fixed, it was intentionally damaged.
The investigation comes in wake of the release of a footage showing a cop shooting 17-year-old Laquan McDonald. Less than two weeks later, technicians reported, “no problems found”, police records show. Investigators found that only one of the five dashcams present during the incident could record audio, while only two could record video.
Van Dyke was immediately charged with first-degree murder but was later freed on bail.
A police spokesman has answered this question by saying that since the crackdown on officers to make sure their dash cams were working properly, there has been a 70% increase in the amount of videos recorded at the end of their shift.
Of the 22 Chicago Police-involved shooting investigations examined by the Independent Police Review Authority, only three included dashcam video footage. Soon afterwards, DNA Info scoured 1,800 police maintenance logs, and discovered that Chicago police routinely jeopardized dash cameras by tampering with microphones and batteries. The CPD has blamed the failures on “operator error or in some cases intentional destruction”, and a close reading of that review by DNAinfo Chicago reveals the extent of the latter.
But community activist Gregory Seal Livingston, who has been among those calling for Emanuel’s resignation over police shootings, said he was “incredibly skeptical” that anything will get done. One vehicle failed to record video “due to disk error”, while another suffered a “power issue” that resulted in the dashcam being “not engaged”.
“The Police Department will not tolerate officers maliciously destructing equipment”, a police spokesperson tells DNA Info Chicago. Interim Police Superintendent John Escalante, appointed in December, issued suspensions of up to three days to officers who damaged their dashcams. Neither did four other police vehicles on scene during the shooting. “The NSA cautions that the current zeal for operational transparency and videography needs to take into account the privacy conerns of our residents as well”, it said in a statement submitted to a White House task force on 21st century policing. He also invoked the now-infamous “Ferguson effect”, claiming that all the attention on police misconduct has discouraged officers from doing their jobs.
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About 12,000 of the Chicago Police Department’s officers and supervisors will get 40 hours of training “on techniques and best practices to de-escalate interactions with individuals in crisis, particularly people with mental illnesses”, according to a news release.
