Supreme Court chamber
Credit: Wikimedia

The Chicago police officer Jason Van Dyke fired 16 shots, killing the African-American teenager Laquan McDonald; 14 of those shots were apparently fired while McDonald lay on the ground. It took four years and the expulsion of the state attorney general before the trial against Van Dyke for first-degree murder resulted in convictions for the lesser crimes of second-degree murder and aggravated battery this October. Before the shooting, Van Dyke ranked among the worst 3 per cent of officers in excessive force allegations, making him identifiable as a ‘problem officer’ even before he killed McDonald. This case is remarkable not for the violence committed by a white police officer against an unarmed African American, but because it involved a rare instance of the United States’ legal system scrutinising a police shooting. The courts in the US have done little to intervene more generally in the mass surveillance, mass violence and mass incarceration affecting people of colour.

Racial division has always been the transcendent theme of American […]