CHICAGO—Chicago police officers who watched one of their own shoot a black teenager 16 times filed reports depicting a version of events that contrasted sharply with what was captured on the dashcam footage that has sparked protests and cost the police commissioner his job.
The city released hundreds of pages of documents late Friday pertaining to the October 2014 killing of 17-year-old Laquan McDonald by a white police officer, Jason Van Dyke. He was charged with first-degree murder late last month, only hours before the department released the video under a court order and after keeping it from the public for more than a year.
The video shows McDonald veering away from officers on a four-lane street when Van Dyke opened fire from close range and continued shooting after the teen had crumpled to the ground and was barely moving.
In newly-released police reports, however, several officers, including Van Dyke, described McDonald as aggressively approaching officers while armed with a knife.
Van Dyke told an investigator that McDonald was “swinging the knife in an aggressive, exaggerated manner” and that McDonald “raised the knife across chest” and pointed it at Van Dyke, according to one police report. Multiple officers reported that even after McDonald was down, he kept trying to get up with the knife in his hand.
“In defense of his life, Van Dyke backpedaled and fired his handgun at McDonald, to stop the attack,” one report reads. “McDonald fell to the ground but continued to move and continued to grasp the knife, refusing to let go of it.”
Van Dyke told an investigator that he feared that McDonald would rush him with the knife or throw it at him. He also noted a 2012 Chicago Police Department warning about a weapon that was a knife but was capable of firing a bullet, hence making it firearm, according to the reports.
The officers’ portrayal of the incident, recorded in hundreds of pages of handwritten and typed reports, prompted police supervisors to rule at the time that McDonald’s death was a justifiable homicide and within the bounds of the department’s use of force guidelines. It’s not clear who wrote some of the police reports.
