Well perhaps this was necessary way before the Van Dyke trial:
Nearly two years after a Chicago police officer fatally shot Laquan McDonald and numerous colleagues filed reports that clashed with video of the shooting, the Police Department on Thursday announced plans to seek the firing of seven officers for allegedly lying about the shooting.
The department's actions represent a long-delayed official response to a shooting that has come to publicly symbolize broad and long-standing problems with policing in Chicago. The move by Superintendent Eddie Johnson also signifies a stand against what the department's critics say is a pervasive and corrosive practice by officers — covering up for one another even in the most troubling situations.
"This is the classic code of silence situation where you have an incident go down and you've got multiple police officers who all feel obligated to help cover the behavior of police officers," said criminal defense attorney Terry Ekl. "Those examples happen over and over and over again. ... Before you know it, an entire community of people do not trust the police, they do not respect the police, they do not like the police. And that is the situation we have now."
Johnson's announcement came in response to a six-month investigation by the Chicago inspector general's office into the shooting by Officer Jason Van Dyke that was captured on a dashboard camera of a responding police vehicle. The footage went viral after the city was forced to release it by a judge last fall after months of resistance.
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