I have mostly ignored the fun with the Chicago Police Department over the shooting of a suspect; maybe it's fatigue over the issue, maybe it was the lack of an incriminating video (at least one publicly available). But I heard a story last week that got me angry.
Mind you, I'm from The Deep South, where the local constabulary aren't exactly choir boys -- there's an old joke about when the southern State Trooper hit a pedestrian and knocked him 50 feet in the air; when the pedestrian came to, he was being held in the pokey for "leaving the scene of an accident" -- but knowing you have multiple cars with dashcams recording you, have the audacity to go into a nearby Burger King and demand the surveillance tapes (which the manager allowed, figuring it was part of the investigation) and then not know why there's an 86 minute gap during the critical time frame is beyond ballsy. To further claim it was a system error that caused the lost footage when another tape shows officers reviewing the tape repeatedly for 2 hours in the store further strains credibility.
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/loca ... story.html
Key excerpts:
Minutes after McDonald was shot 16 times by Officer Jason Van Dyke on a Southwest Side street, several police officers entered a Burger King located just yards from where the teen fell, demanding to view the restaurant's password-protected surveillance video, Jay Darshane, a district manager for the fast-food chain, told the Tribune this week.
When the police left the restaurant almost two hours later, the video had an inexplicable 86-minute gap that included when McDonald was shot, according to Darshane.
In announcing the charge against Van Dyke, State's Attorney Anita Alvarez said forensic testing revealed no evidence that anyone had intentionally erased the Burger King video. NBC5 News first broke the story about the missing footage.
"We have looked at those videos and ... it doesn't appear that it's been tampered with," Alvarez told reporters.
It seems like this wasn't the only technical glitch -- seems there was audio problems with the dashcams (yes, plural):Darshane said the restaurant's assistant manager called him that night saying about four or five police officers were inside demanding the password to access the surveillance video. He authorized the manager of the store — who wasn't working at the time — to give the code to the officers.
The officers stayed on the scene until almost midnight and even brought in their own information technology specialist when it appeared they were having trouble operating the system, Darshane said.
The equipment had been in perfect working order for weeks before the shooting, Darshane said. But the next morning, Burger King discovered the 86-minute gap when investigators with the Independent Police Review Authority, which investigates police shootings, sought to make a DVD copy of the surveillance video. Missing was any footage from 9:13 p.m. to 10:39 p.m., Darshane said. [NOTE: the shooting occurred at 9:58pm]
When the video system kicked back on, it recorded two police officers in the Burger King office who appeared to be looking at something on the monitor over and over, according to Michael Robbins, an attorney representing McDonald's family.
"It is curious," Robbins said. "If they got there and turned it on and found that there was no video, what were they looking at for two hours?"
Yep, this one smells real funny. And if there aren't some Obstruction of Justice charges that come out of this, I'll be disappointed. But then, these were charges that were being investigated for a year, but weren't brought until the day after the courts orders release of the dashcam videos. I know you want to get it right, but this is starting to fail the smell test big time.The [five dashcam] videos, including the one from Van Dyke's vehicle, did not include any audio of officers talking, either in the vehicles or over police radios, raising questions about why sirens outside the vehicles could be heard but voices inside the vehicle could not.
