DN:FILM 16 Shots
16 SHOTS documents the aftermath of yet another tragic shooting, this the 2014 one that killed Laquan McDonald, who was struck 16 times by a Chicago police officer firing his weapon. Its media pattern began the grimly familiar way: A young African American male is felled by a police officer; a justification is proffered; and the media parrots out the official version of events until the public moves on. Pat Camden, a retired spokesman for the Chicago Fraternal Order of Police, offers this take in the film: “A police department has to be first in the media,” Camden says. “It is incumbent that they are the ones that are putting out the information.”
The official statement put out about MacDonald’s death was that the officer acted justifiably in self-defense. Many in Chicago—police, politicians, media, even much of the public—wanted to accept this story; further, the police department made efforts to ensure it could not be contradicted. The film demonstrates how facts, slow to emerge though they may be, eventually tell a different tale. It tracks the efforts to bring truths to light, demonstrating the roiling effects each new piece of evidence has on the impacted city. And the film shows the impact of film.
16 Shots shows what transpires during the days and months and years after the shooting via local tv footage, filmed courtroom testimony, and official documentation such as McDonald's autopsy; and with interviews with a host of individuals on either side of the justifiable-shooting debate. And while filmmaker Rick Rowley patiently lets proponents of both sides air their views, it’s a grainy dash-cam video that captured the entire event—MacDonald, knife in hand and back to the camera, jogging down the street, encountering police cars, and, then, shot after shot after shot fired at MacDonald while he lay on the street—that provides the chilling pivot to the story. Witness testimony and the examination of the body had raised questions about what had happened; but once the now-infamous footage became public, the police-sanctioned version of events failed to square. It’s the seventeenth shot—the one that captured the others, and that was initially kept under wraps but now lives outside the confines of the Chicago city bureaucracy—that provides the direct counter to the official story of MacDonald’s death.