Shop

Under orders from a judge, Mayor Rahm Emanuel's administration on Nov. 24, haltingly and reluctantly, released a police dash-cam video that showed a white police officer shooting a black teenager, Laquan McDonald. The video roiled Chicago. Protesters took to the streets. The police superintendent was fired. The officer who shot McDonald -- a ward of the state -- was charged with murder. And the U.S. Justice Department launched a civil rights investigation into the nation's second largest police department. During the next three weeks, Tribune reporters set out to examine how the city and the Chicago Police Department had reached this point, and to put into context McDonald's life and his fatal encounter with a department with a sordid history of brutality against minorities.