2016 Courage Prize Speech

Transcript of the Courage prize introduction and speeches

WESLEY LOWERY:  Thank you all so much for having me. It’s a true honor to be able to help present this award to a colleague and someone I consider a friend. And I’ll also note that Jill Leovy, whose book was remarkable, was once very briefly my editor at the LA Times and was working on the book then. So it’s very exciting to see her work honored as well.

From February 9th, 2014, through the end of that calendar year, there was no topic that more captivated the nation and that more dominated the media than that of police violence. We know the names; Michael Brown in Ferguson, Eric Gardner in Staten Island, John Crawford in Beaver Creek, Ohio, Tamir Rice in my home town of Cleveland. But at the same time, there’d been a killing in Chicago and, frankly, then we didn’t know that name. A young black man by the name of Laquan McDonald.

We didn’t really know his name, the police said he charged officers with a knife. And that story, really, in one of the media capitals of the country was not covered, besides the initial reports; essentially stenography of the police version of events. Like too many instances of police violence, there was little skepticism of the account, which quickly just faded out of the public consciousness.

That was until Jamie Kalven began making his calls. Armed with a good source and a hunch, he began knocking on doors and tracking down witnesses who the police said didn’t exist, witnesses who they had not taken statements from. He filed a records request, and he secured an autopsy report. He heard there was video and he litigated to force the City of Chicago to have that video released. That work, that courageous work, taking on the powerful Chicago Police Department and their team of lawyers in the name of truth and transparency, made a difference.

Laquan McDonald had been shot 16 times. He was not charging officers. Rather, as the video shows, he was shot as he continued to flee them, bullets continuing to pierce his body as he lay on the ground. Police play a crucial, vital, essential role in our democracy and our society. They keep us safe and they risk their lives. But, we must never forget that they’re an extension of our government. Each person killed by the police has been, in essence, executed without trial or due process. Too often, journalists intoxicated by celebrity, seek proximity to power.

But we have to remember that it is our job as journalists to hold powerful institutions accountable, to ask them hard questions and make them justify their behaviors. Jamie Kalven played a crucial role in assuring that that happened in Chicago and that the family of Laquan McDonald received justice. It’s my honor to present the Ridenhour Courage Prize to Jamie Kalven.

JAMIE KALVEN:  Thank you, Wes. My first reaction when Randy called to tell me I’d been selected to receive the 2016 Ridenhour Courage Prize was to recall a Robert Benchley line my father was very fond of. “You must be thinking of the other Mozart.” [laughter] My second reaction was at once to be honored and humbled to have my name linked with that of Ron Ridenhour and to find myself in the company of past recipients of the prize.

My third, and enduring, reaction is profound gratitude for this acknowledgement of past work that serves as an inspiration for the work that lies ahead. When I first stood at the site of the Laquan McDonald shooting several weeks after the incident, I couldn’t have imagined standing at this podium 16 months later. Nor could I have imagined the extraordinary and mysterious process by which Laquan McDonald’s story has become a public narrative that bears comparison with that of another child of Chicago, Emmett Till. The story has broken through into the moral imagination, providing an avenue for deeper understanding of systemic conditions that give rise to police abuse and impunity. The crime, the execution of a child on the streets of Chicago, is shocking.

Equally shocking has been the institutional response to that crime. While the boy was bleeding out on the street, the machinery of denial went into motion. Evidence was destroyed, witnesses were intimidated, police reports were falsified, public information was withheld from the public. And ultimately, a $5 million settlement was entered into by the city with the family of Laquan McDonald on the condition that the now-famous video not be released.

For 13 months, at every level and at every turn, city officials maintained a narrative about the incident they knew to be untrue. The term code of silence evokes something essential; the coerced silence of police officers who don’t report misconduct by fellow officers for fear of reprisal. And equally, the silence of abused citizens who believe they have no redress.

Yet, the term is also something of a misnomer. For the larger phenomena is not a matter of silence, it’s a matter of narrative control. The code is best seen as a set of tools for enforcing that control. To an extraordinary degree, in the wake of the political upheaval precipitated by the McDonald case, the City of Chicago has lost control of the narrative. [applause] This has created an historic opportunity for real and enduring reform.

As Danielle noted, last week a task force on police accountability appointed by the mayor, issued its report, a sweeping indictment of entrenched racism within the department and a detailed blueprint for reform. The report states, and I’ll quote this extraordinary language again, “The police in Chicago have no regard for the sanctity of life when it comes to people of color.” That’s from an official body in Chicago.

Racism is foundational. Issues of police accountability are embedded in the great unfinished business of American life, the blood knot of race. If reform is to run true, we must construct a path forward akin to South Africa emerging from apartheid that leads over time to a different kind of society.

It won’t be easy. While this may prove to be a transformative moment, there are no transformative remedies. Rather, there are an array of concrete measures, reforms, interventions, none of them transformative in themselves, that may in the aggregate begin to change systems and cultures.

It’s yet to be seen whether we’ll be able to rise to the occasion. If we are to do so, we must resist the tendency, in itself a form of denial, to rush past diagnosis to prescription. While it’s imperative to implement particular reforms as soon as possible, it’s also critically important to sustain the process of diagnosis, of truth telling, of public acknowledgement.

The knowledge necessary to fix the system exists within the system, but it’s atomized, scattered, divided from itself. In recent years in Chicago, we’ve broken through official secrecy and established the principle that police misconduct files are public information. We thus have unprecedented access to police disciplinary data. It’s equally important, though, to access information on the ground in the communities most affected by abusive policing, and equally to create conditions such that conscientious police officer do not have to risk everything in order to report misconduct by fellow officers.

This process of public acknowledgement is exemplified by the McDonald case. We would not know the name Laquan McDonald were it not for the civic courage of two individuals who must, for the moment, themselves remain unnamed; a whistleblower in law enforcement who reached out with a tip about the case and a civilian witness, who despite his fears of police reprisals, told me what he had seen. I dedicate this unexpected and heartening award to them. Thank you.