Report: Officer Van Dyke Intentionally Broke Dashcam Before Laquan McDonald Shooting

Jason Van Dyke (L) and Laquan McDonald (WGN Screenshots)
Jason Van Dyke (L) and Laquan McDonald (WGN Screenshots)

The Chicago offi­cer who killed Laquan McDonald nev­er synced his micro­phone to his dash­cam and even inten­tion­al­ly dam­aged the cam­era, accord­ing to police main­te­nance logs. What’s worse: He’s not the only offi­cer to do so. Over 1800 logs first obtained by DNAinfo Chicago show that offi­cers reg­u­lar­ly dam­age their cam­eras or find ways to keep the sound from sync­ing. Their meth­ods include hid­ing micro­phones in glove box­es, pulling out the bat­ter­ies, dam­ag­ing anten­nae, and so on. The logs showed that Jason Van Dyke, the offi­cer involved in the Laquan McDonald shoot­ing, caused “inten­tion­al dam­age” to his dash­cam at least once, though the logs indi­cate that the dash­cam was bro­ken mul­ti­ple times. On the day of the shoot­ing, the audio for the video was not picked up by his car or the one next to his.

One month after the shoot­ing, a Nov. 21 review of 10 videos down­loaded from Van Dyke’s squad car deter­mined it was “appar­ent … that per­son­nel have failed to sync the MICs [sic],” accord­ing police records. Of the five police vehi­cles that were present the night of the shoot­ing, only two had dash­cams that actu­al­ly record­ed video, and one of those was report­ed­ly bro­ken. Records show that, five days before the shoot­ing, a request was put in to repair the dash­cam, though “no prob­lem” was found with the equip­ment when it was exam­ined October 31. One week lat­er, the sys­tem was report­ed­ly bro­ken again, with a “hard­ware issue” remain­ing unad­dressed for four months. Three addi­tion­al dash­cams were unable to cap­ture footage the night of the shoot­ing, due to sys­tem mal­func­tions that inclue: “Power issue,” “disc error” and “appli­ca­tion error.”

It was not until McDonald was shot and killed by Officer Jason Van Dyke that Chicago PD rec­og­nized the wide­spread issue of offi­cers inten­tion­al­ly tam­per­ing with dash­cams and dash­cam micro­phones. Following the release of the one dash­cam video of the shoot­ing, Van Dyke has been charged with first degree mur­der.
Report: Officer Van Dyke inten­tion­al­ly broke dash­cam before Laquan McDonald shooting

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