Two journalists held City of Chicago accountable for police killing of civilian

Two journalists and a lawyer in Chicago broke open the case of the police killing of 17-year-old Laquan McDonald -- first the autopsy and then dashcam video footage that was seen all over the world.  Brandon Smith, whose suit forced release of the video, was barred (lack of credentials) from the news conference about the video and criminal charges against the policeman.  

Glenn Greenwald helped raise some funding for Smith and Jamie Kalven's investigative Invisible Institute -- and other journalists who do police accountability reporting. Greenwald interviewed Smith:

GREENWALD: One of the things that I’ve always wondered about in reading about the work you did in this case is there are obviously a lot of big media outlets in Chicago like The Chicago Tribune and a bunch of network affiliates and other reasonably well founded media outlets. Why did it fall on you to pursue this case on the courts? . . . 

SMITH:  . . . It’s not so much like a really obvious failure it’s more of like, just a general trusting on their part of government and process. You know, I was a newspaper reporter for five years in Ohio and I got into the same groove of trusting my sources and like getting into a relationship with my sources. And so when they say, “Oh, the investigation is ongoing, to release a video would mean to screw up our investigation,” then I’m sorry to say that I was one of those reporters that just didn’t say boo to that. And over the years I’ve kind of developed this independent mindset that I think is really important in our work and I wish more people had it.