“Sixteen Shots and a Cover-Up!”: Mainstream and Black News Media Coverage of Chicago's Struggle Over Police Reform

Asking Questions: Moving from Consensus to Controversy

The Tribune first reported McDonald's death on October 21, 2014, the day after he was killed, in a standard crime news article that falls squarely within the sphere of consensus. In the article, quoted in its entirety, Ford (2014) attributes all information to a police spokesperson:

Chicago police shot and killed a 17-year-old boy on the Southwest Side after the teen refused to put down a knife, authorities said. Police received a call of someone trying to break into cars near 40th and Karlov in Archer Heights around 9:45 p.m. Monday, according to Pat Camden, a spokesman for the Fraternal Order of Police. A squad car arrived on the scene, and officers spotted the teen – later identified as Laquan McDonald – standing next to a car with a knife in his hand, Camden said. The teen began walking toward Pulaski Road and ignored the officers’ requests to drop the knife, Camden said.

This initial article presumed a consensus around the narratives that the police protect the public from dangerous criminals and that the suspect's actions warranted police use of force. Ford placed McDonald within these narratives through two facts: someone was reported trying to break into cars, and McDonald was seen “standing next to a car” while holding a knife, implying his involvement in a crime and thus his threat to public safety. With the benefit of hindsight, we can recognize the last sentence as the CPD's justification for shooting (e.g., McDonald defied police orders) and concealment of facts (e.g., McDonald was shot while walking away). Together, these elements characterize McDonald's death as unfortunate but warranted, underscoring the power of police as trusted authority figures (Chermak & Weiss, 2005).

In subsequent months, freelance journalist Jamie Kalven revealed discrepancies between police accounts and alleged witness accounts, shifting the discourse into the sphere of legitimate controversy. On December 10, the Defender first covered this topic by reposting a Huffington Post article that questioned the police version of events in light of the recently published autopsy results. In the article, Kalven and law professor Craig Futterman alleged that McDonald had been shot several times while lying on the ground, summarized eyewitness accounts that contradicted police statements, and reasoned that dashcam footage of the incident almost certainly existed.

The Tribune published six articles in March–April 2015 that began to question the police characterization of McDonald's death as routine and unremarkable. The first three articles, published between March 26 and April 14, relied entirely on statements from government entities—namely, the Cook County medical examiner's office, the CPD, and city officials. Here, the Tribune implicitly challenged the police version of events by sharing information produced by other government offices that suggested improper or excessive police violence. In doing so, the Tribune began to shift its coverage into the sphere of legitimate controversy, although its “straight recitation of official statements” kept the discourse near the sphere of consensus (Hallin, 1986, p. 117). By framing the controversy as a conflict between dominant groups, the Tribune maintained its traditional “guard dog” role and limited the terms of the controversy to a critique of specific individuals in power rather than a systemic critique (Bishop, 2000, p. 67).

The Tribune ventured further into the sphere of legitimate controversy in the rest of its month-long coverage. An April 15 article marked the first time the Tribune reported contacting McDonald's family for comment, a step further into the sphere of legitimate controversy to incorporate perspectives beyond public institutional statements. Two other articles published the same day continue this direction. An editorial more explicitly highlighted the discourse as controversial through comments such as “so let's see that video.” A 2,500-word investigative piece juxtaposed community member Ed Nance's 2007 experience of Van Dyke using excessive force with quotes from city and police officials and McDonald's family's lawyers. Together, these articles report a wide range of discourses, raising questions about McDonald's conduct, Van Dyke's repeated and racialized use of force, and the existence of not-yet-public dash camera video footage. The Tribune's expanded sourcing, detailing of patterns of CPD misconduct, and editorialized commentary marked the beginning of its efforts to act as a “watchdog” that directly and independently challenges dominant power structures (Donohue et al., 1995, p. 118).

Even as news media discourse moved toward the sphere of legitimate controversy and away from its “guard dog” role, the events thus far constituted “business as usual” for the CPD and the City of Chicago. McDonald's death was one of 65 police-involved shootings in Chicago in 2014, an average of one CPD shooting every five days (Smith Richards et al., 2016). Large settlements for police misconduct are common in Chicago; the City's $5 million settlement with McDonald's family accounted for just 13% of the City's $39,407,285 expenditure on CPD settlements and judgments in 2015 (Cubbage, 2022). Throughout 2015, the CPD declined to respond to inquiries about discrepancies between police statements and the autopsy report. These eight articles comprised the entirety of Tribune and Defender coverage in the year following McDonald's death, demonstrating the efficacy of the City's strategy to limit public discourse.

A Rupture in Hegemonic Domination: The Conjunctural Crisis Begins

The November 24, 2015 dashcam video release and indictment of Van Dyke set off a conjunctural crisis (Hall et al., 1978), marked by rampant public mistrust of State-sponsored institutions in Chicago. In this second phase of coverage, media directly questioned official narratives and platformed protesters’ outrage. The dashcam video, which showed McDonald was shot while walking away from Van Dyke, directly contradicted earlier police statements and almost immediately began circulating on social media, local television news, and digital news media outlets. That the City only released the video 400 days later upon court order, after prosecutors had pressured McDonald's family during settlement negotiations not to release the video, points to the City's efforts to shield the CPD from scrutiny. Cook County State's Attorney Anita Alvarez declined to indict Van Dyke for 13 months until mere hours before the video was released, indicating collusion among city and county entities, including police, legal, and mayoral offices. Public outrage thereby focused not only on Van Dyke's excessive use of force but also on the evidence of a cover-up.

The crisis pushed both Defender and Tribune coverage well into the sphere of legitimate controversy, disrupting institutional narratives’ consensus by amplifying counterdiscourses. Both outlets characterized protesters positively as “activists” and “organizers” engaged in largely peaceful acts of civil disobedience, detailing specific strategies such as creating a civilian police accountability council. News media's legitimization of counterdiscourses disrupted the hegemony of State-sponsored institutional discourses.

To be sure, coverage within the sphere of legitimate controversy did not entirely depart from traditional journalistic privileging of institutional sources. For example, the Tribune article “More Chicago police officers to wear body cameras” (November 30, 2015) quotes the chief of police and the mayor, respectively, that more body cameras will “reduce citizen complaints against police” and “enhance transparency and credibility.” No other perspectives are included, and although the article notes the recent release of the McDonald dashcam video, the journalist does not highlight the irony that video footage in the McDonald case, which the city fought bitterly to keep private, did not prevent police misconduct. Articles like this demonstrate real-time institutional efforts to regain hegemonic control of the narrative as the discourse shifted further from dominant consensus and established itself as a legitimate controversy.

On balance, however, both newspapers embraced the sphere of legitimate controversy by producing in-depth investigative journalism around systemic and widespread police misconduct. Tribune articles such as “Chicago's flawed system for investigating police shootings” (December 5, 2015) and “92 deaths, 2,623 bullets: Tracking every Chicago police shooting over 6 years” (August 26, 2016) leveraged substantial resources to obtain and analyze years of CPD data about shootings. Likewise, Defender articles such as “Fraternal Order of Police” (January 7, 2016) and “The Fight to Save Police Misconduct Records” (January 13, 2016) detailed historic and current legal protections for police officers as well as activists’ ongoing legal efforts to access police complaints dating back decades. These investigative pieces highlighted the legal battles necessary to access data produced by State-sponsored institutions, laying the groundwork for public mistrust of not only the CPD but also institutions tasked with checking CPD power. No longer was Tribune coverage focused on individual actors but rather on systemic issues in dominant systems of power, a departure from its traditional “guard dog” role (Bishop, 2000).

News media also provided a real-time public record of the disruption of state hegemonic domination vis-à-vis Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel's discursive shifts. Just one week before the video's court-ordered release, Emanuel defended his decision not to release the dashcam footage. Emanuel reiterated his support for CPD Superintendent Garry McCarthy on December 1 before succumbing to public pressure to fire McCarthy the following day. Emanuel also opposed calls for DOJ investigation of the CPD on December 1 before reversing course two days later amid national pushback. Emanuel's about-faces exemplified his individual efforts to shift blame and retain political power as well as the State's scramble to assuage public outrage and regain control of discourse absent systemic changes by conceding minimal reform.

Institutional spokespeople continued to justify inaction and dismiss apparent collusion as the proper process during an ongoing investigation, steering discourse back toward the sphere of consensus. However, news media now juxtaposed institutional statements with counternarratives from organizers, public figures, and journalists’ own editorializations, amplifying public mistrust in dominant institutions and critiquing “business as usual” as fundamentally flawed. For example, a November 28 Defender article explicitly challenged Alvarez's statement that not releasing the video “was in the best interest of the investigation.” The article noted public demands for Alvarez’ resignation, and the journalist also infused her own perspective:

The public's not buying it. They know that there was more to it than what is being said. […] And there lies the real issue. Alvarez knew of [the video's] content and with that could have pressed charges if not immediately after Laquan's murder, certainly sooner than 400 days later. Had she brought up charges against Van Dyke at least she would have appeared as having some interest in justice to the Black community. Too many times has it witnessed her betrayal and so there is no trust in her effort to pursue justice where Blacks are concerned. (El’Zabar, 2015b)

As a “watchdog,” El’Zabar explicitly advances the counternarrative that mainstream institutions are inherently harmful to the Black community, broadening the scope of journalistic norms within the sphere of legitimate controversy.

This counternarrative, which would grow into a deviant consensus, disrupted the terms by which state institutions engaged in public discourse. No longer did the public debate the facts of McDonald's death, as the dashcam video all but confirmed police misconduct. Instead, discourse converged around political responsibility, a precursor to debates around substantive police reform and/or abolition. As a result, state institutions were forced to engage in discourse rooted in the existence of systemic racism rather than the presumption of state institutions’ benevolence.

Care, Critical Social Capital, and Deviant Consensus in the Black Press

Following the initial onset of the conjunctural crisis, Defender and Tribune coverage diverged in particular ways from within the sphere of legitimate controversy. The third phase focuses on Defender coverage in the years following the conjunctural crisis. The context of the Black press as an advocate for Black community interests (Vercellotti & Brewer, 2006) offers a lens through which to understand the Defender's blurring of objectivity and editorialization. Defender journalists spoke to readers but also for and with the collective “Black community,” advancing political consciousness by educating readers on systemic injustices (Ginwright, 2007). In doing so, the Defender explicitly encouraged community-wide distrust of mainstream institutions and their agents, including police and city officials.

Urging readers to question police versions of events became a hallmark of Defender coverage. For example, in reporting a CPD shooting of an unarmed Black man, El’Zabar (2015j) immediately followed official police statements with editorialization: “Police arrived on the scene and one brother was shot, according to the police source. How vague a report.” Another article comments on a Facebook video of a CPD officer harassing two Chicagoans:

Smh. As for the claim that the guy can’t record the cop without the cop's consent… The news has determined….that was a lie. According to NBC Chicago 5 and state law, it is legal in Illinois to record a cop working in public regardless of their consent. So we have a cop who boasts about killing folks and he doesn’t know the law. Moving on.

These examples demonstrate how the Defender toed the line of journalistic standards. The paper's combined news-editorial style enabled it to more harshly critique the CPD than its mainstream counterpart; whereas the Tribune implied the CPD's untrustworthiness through investigative pieces and quotes, the Defender explicitly coached its readers not to trust the CPD. The Defender, in advocating blanket mistrust of the CPD, also cast doubt on the veracity of dominant institutions that collaborate with the CPD, such as city offices and mainstream media:

We encourage our readers to be mindful of the fact that after a highly publicized officer-involved shooting, most initial news reports in the media are simply a retelling of the police version of events. […] As the Laquan McDonald video has proven, this police version of events is not always necessarily the truth; nevertheless, MSM [mainstream media] accepts it as the truth and continues to tell that narrative. (Hare, 2016k)

Hare critiques outlets like the Tribune for their reliance on and uncritical publication of police statements and establishes the Defender as a countermedia (Hopp & Ferrucci, 2020) that creates a counterpublic organized around experiences of anti-Black racism (Downey & Fenton, 2003).

The Defender employed care-based journalism (Jones, 2024) throughout its coverage, disrupting dominant institutional narratives by detailing readers’ lived experiences of police racism, specifically connecting McDonald's murder to the deaths of countless other Black community members at the hands of the police. For example, El’Zabar's (2015j) coverage of three CPD killings of Black Chicagoans in 12 hours centered community members’ reactions:

As the anger rose seeping from their oppressed spirits a woman yelled at police, telling them that if they wanted to shoot their guns, they should “go hunting” instead. On the other end of the block, a young Black man paced back and forth like a caged prisoner […] while looking at the one who assisted the Black man's captors. […] Another Black male youth cursed at officers and sneered, “Why you never shoot white kids?”

El’Zabar's performative language emphasizes police as agents of coloniality who enact violence, oppression, and death on racialized Others. The Defender's centering of community members’ lived experience of violence creates a dialogue through which readers and journalists collectively develop an “embodied politics of resistance” (Johnson, 2001, p. 4).

The Defender's centering of Black embodied knowledges extended to its journalists’ lived experiences as Black Chicagoans. Defender journalists drew on their own embodied knowledge to discursively frame issues through implicit choices of subject matter and sourcing and through editorializations within articles, blurring the boundaries of “objective” journalism and enabling horizontal discourses between journalists and readers (Downey & Fenton, 2003). The Defender thus rejected the mainstream journalistic norms enacted in Tribune coverage that attempted to distance the journalist's subjectivity from their coverage. In doing so, the Defender actualized its mission of fostering dialogue and debate among Chicago's Black communities.

These excerpts exemplify moments in 2015–2016 in which the Defender framed public discourse within a “sphere of deviant consensus,” establishing widespread public agreement that the CPD is racist and untrustworthy by design. The sphere of dominant consensus housed the hegemonic ideology that State-sponsored institutions need no reform (e.g., the police can be trusted to protect and serve); counternarratives from people who oppose State-sponsored institutions are relegated to the sphere of deviance and excluded from mainstream public debate. The conjunctural crisis ruptured hegemonic domination and shifted public discourse into the sphere of legitimate controversy, casting counternarratives such as police reform as legitimate fodder for debate within news media. In taking for granted the need for police reform, the sphere of deviant consensus altered the terms of public discourse, forcing dominant institutions to engage in conversations about how and when, rather than whether, reforms would be enacted.

The Defender was not immune to institutions’ efforts to restore public trust in State-sponsored institutions, and there were certainly Defender articles that ran counter to the sphere of deviant consensus. For example, the Defender published profiles of Black leaders of state institutions, such as Cook County Circuit Court Chief Judge Tim Evans and Police Accountability Task Force (PATF) leader Lori Lightfoot, as well as ran full press releases from Black-led organizations. Absent across this coverage was the Defender's hallmark centering of community members’ experiences. Instead, in these articles, the Defender privileged institutional statements and institutionally affiliated perspectives, a practice that aligned with mainstream journalistic norms.

The Defender's deference to institutional narratives—those of Black institutions, Black leaders, and, occasionally, State institutions—limited its counterhegemonic possibilities. Evans and Lightfoot, as “official, high-ranking” Black elites (Bishop, 2000, p. 75), exemplify a modern-day version of Fanon's (2004) native bourgeoisie, which models state systems after the original (colonizer) bourgeoisie to gain political power while failing to achieve proximity to whiteness. Fanon (2004) argues the native bourgeoisie seeks individual power within the colonial system rather than “the radical overthrow of the system” (p. 22), thereby achieving “nothing else but prolong[ing] the heritage of the colonial economy, thinking, and institutions” (p. 120). To be sure, each leader implemented reforms aimed at improving racial equity in the justice system, indicating a goal to advance not only their own political power but also that of their communities. Yet reforms do not necessarily produce more equitable systems, a core tenet of abolitionist organizing. In uncritically featuring the modern-day native bourgeoisie, the Defender advanced readers’ trust in State institutions by alluding to the efficacy of reforms. In doing so, the Defender undermined its own abolitionist discourses of State-sponsored institutions as racist by design and fundamentally untrustworthy.

The Defender's allegiance to Black institutional narratives opened the door for occasional platforming of dominant institutional narratives around police reform. For example, a September 2016 article on the mayor's new “anti-violence, anti-crime plan” was comprised entirely of quotes from the speech and descriptions of Emanuel's delivery. In doing so, this article uncritically reproduced the discourse of a few bad apples: “Emanuel reminded us that police are not bad. The few bad seeds taint the many who are good because the bad stand out, but the good that is done daily is taken for granted and goes under the radar.” Though rare in Defender coverage, articles like this demonstrate dominant institutions’ successes in interrupting the sphere of deviant consensus and platforming discourses compatible with hegemonic power.

These findings offer insight into the Defender's role as a “parallel public sphere” (Jordan, 2001, p. 4) through which Black leaders and institutions debate police reform. Just as traditional news media act as sentries for dominant power structures, the Defender has long adopted a “guard dog” role in which it uncritically centers Black institutional responses to social problems while deferring to their authority (Donohue et al., 1995). The Defender's privileging of Black institutional statements reflects its nuanced role as a legacy Black news outlet that falls somewhere in between Downey and Fenton's (2003) binary of mainstream mass media versus “smaller civic media” (p. 188). Put another way, the Defender simultaneously serves as both an advocacy press that employs care-based journalism to produce discourse informed by marginalized perspectives (Jones, 2024) and a traditional press beholden to institutional influence on profit models, journalistic norms, and content framing.

The Mainstream Press as Both “Guard Dog” and “Watchdog”

In this same 2016–2018 time period, the Tribune sustained the conjunctural crisis on its own terms, marking the fourth phase of analysis. Although the Tribune acknowledged the racially inequitable outcomes of Chicago policing, it did not embrace the Defender's narrative of State-sponsored institutions as racist by design and thus functioning as intended. Instead, the Tribune described Chicago's systems of police accountability as “flawed,” “broken,” and “seemingly designed to fail,” an indictment of the CPD and, by extension, the State-sponsored institutions that protected CPD misconduct. The Tribune also continued to invest its own resources in support of the legitimate controversy; for example, it sued the CPD in December 2016 to gain access to police email correspondence.

A feature of the Tribune's 2016–2017 coverage was its discussion of proposed and enacted CPD reform measures. The Tribune's frequent references to the PATF and DOJ report findings in its coverage of CPD reforms in 2017 and beyond enabled the paper to sustain critique of the CPD while upholding traditional journalistic norms. The Tribune framed the controversy not as a struggle between State institutions and marginalized peoples but rather as a conflict among dominant groups, thereby enacting the traditional mainstream press role of a “guard dog” deferential to dominant power structures (Bishop, 2000, p. 66). By citing institutionally sanctioned evidence of police misconduct, the Tribune leaves open the door for a restoration of public trust in State-sponsored institutions; its coverage of the PATF and DOJ reports suggests some State-sponsored institutions serve as meaningful checks on CPD power.

The Tribune's coverage at this time took a small step toward the Defender's care-based foregrounding of its readers’ lived experiences. Profiles of McDonald, as well as investigative reports, shared stories of predominantly Black community members’ experiences of police violence and subsequent lack of recourse. These stories, however, were not told by community members or even their families but through institutional documentation (e.g., police reports, autopsy reports, court documents) and other institutional sources. In doing so, the Tribune did not disrupt the traditional privileging of institutional voices nor ground its coverage in the experiences of everyday community members.

The lead-up to Van Dyke's fall 2018 trial marked a diversification in Tribune coverage and roles. In spring 2018, the Tribune joined other news outlets in legal action to prevent Judge Vincent Gaughan from sealing court filings. The Tribune thus embraced its role as “watchdog,” using its resources to “directly and independently challenge” dominant institutions’ secrecy around the process of police accountability (Donohue et al., 1995, p. 118). In-depth profiles of Van Dyke (August 23) and Gaughan (August 24), which juxtapose the subjects’ own words with quotes from critics and McDonald's family, further underscore the Tribune's commitment to providing a real-time counterpoint to dominant narratives. By contrast, the Tribune's 3,000-word feature of McDonald (September 4) centered the perspectives of people who knew McDonald, without state rebuttal. The latter article framed McDonald's death as an unjustified and tragic loss of a promising youth who was repeatedly failed by State-sponsored institutions, priming readers to sympathize with McDonald during Van Dyke's impending trial. The Tribune's alignment with the Defender's longtime role as advocacy press demonstrated a commitment to representing the interests of the people over the interests of dominant groups.

From September 5 through October 5, 2018—the duration of Van Dyke's trial—the Tribune published 54 articles, averaging just under two articles per day. Many of these articles provided daily trial recaps, describing details such as legal arguments, witness testimony, evidence introduced, and jurors’ reactions and featuring statements from lawyers and other “experts” explaining legal minutia. The Tribune's investment of resources to cover each day of the trial enabled the broader public, most of whom could not attend court in-person or watch via livestream, to follow the trial. At the same time, the format of trial recaps naturally focused only on the individual case rather than the broader public discourse around Van Dyke as an exemplar of systemic police misconduct. The Tribune's trial coverage demonstrates how institutional structures impact news media framing of public discourse; the justice system's evaluation of guilt/innocence as an individual matter encourages news media to reframe the legitimate controversy such that the justice system has the capacity to resolve the legitimate controversy and return mainstream discourse to the sphere of dominant consensus.

The Tribune preempted this institutional pull through Dahleen Glanton, a longtime Tribune news columnist who wrote four articles between September 6–20, 2018, spanning jury selection and the first few days of the trial. Glanton vividly described McDonald's death:

The officer fired again and again, even as puffs of smoke rose from the pavement where the teenager lay dying. Sixteen shots in 13 seconds. Pow. Pow. Pow. Pow. Pow. Pow. Pow. Pow. Pow. Pow. Pow. Pow. Pow. Pow. Pow. Pow. (Glanton, 2018c)

Glanton's ability to editorialize within her role as a columnist allowed the Tribune to more explicitly condemn police violence while maintaining its constructed legitimacy and power as an “objective” news media outlet. Glanton followed the Defender's technique of thick description to affectively engage the imagined audience in anger around McDonald's violent death. Glanton thus exemplified the new Black press, leveraging her platform within a mainstream news media outlet to influence public discourse and consensus around racism (Bedingfield, 2023).

As the new Black press, Glanton not only reports on issues relevant to Black readers but also voices Black perspectives in her articles. For example, in discussing Emanuel's choice not to run for reelection, Glanton asserts that although Black Chicagoans had voted for Emanuel en masse in 2015, they would not do so this time:

African-Americans would not have his back. Since the last election, they have become too disillusioned and too angry with the mayor. They don’t like that he closed so many public schools in minority neighborhoods. They think he could have done more to stop the shootings that claim hundreds of Black lives every year. They blame him for the poor relationship between the police and African-American communities. They insist that he has paid too much attention to downtown business interests, while ignoring the South and West sides. But they despise him for the way he handled the McDonald case. (Glanton, 2018a)

Glanton positions herself as a mouthpiece for the Black community and, in doing so, platforms the experiences and opinions of marginalized community members, an act of care that includes Black subjects in mainstream public discourse and thereby asserts their membership in the public sphere. Glanton's use of care-based journalism in mainstream news media, although a small fraction of Tribune coverage and thus a limited dataset, indicates how the new Black press can impact mainstream understandings of knowledge production by foregrounding the journalist's and community members’ lived experiences as embodied knowledge.

The Tribune's dual role as “guard dog” and “watchdog” revealed its ambivalence toward hegemonic power. Like the Defender, the Tribune did not fully free itself from the influence of power structures and remained beholden to State institutions for the access required to produce timely and profitable coverage in the current news media model. Nonetheless, the Tribune dedicated substantial resources to covering and sustaining the legitimate controversy. The Tribune also produced a modest amount of care-based (Black) journalism, suggesting the potential influence of the sphere of deviant consensus in developing the mainstream press as a new type of watchdog willing to further depart from its allegiance to dominant institutions.

The Beginning of the End: Restoring Hegemonic Domination

The Van Dyke trial marked the beginning of the end of the conjunctural crisis. The day before jury selection, on September 4, 2018, Emanuel acknowledged his record-low approval ratings and announced he would not run for reelection. On October 5, Van Dyke was convicted of second-degree murder and 16 counts of aggravated battery, becoming the first CPD officer ever convicted of murder for an on-duty shooting. On January 17, 2019, a judge acquitted the three CPD officers charged with a cover-up, and on January 18, Gaughan sentenced Van Dyke to 81 months in prison, a far cry from the maximum 96-year sentence. Coverage detailed protesters’ mixed reactions, including celebration of the historic murder conviction and waves of political fallout and critique of Van Dyke's sentence and the acquittals in the code of silence trial. On January 31, a U.S. district judge approved a consent decree and court oversight of CPD reform.

Dominant institutions framed this rapid succession of political outcomes as evidence that institutional checks and balances were improving CPD transparency and accountability, an effort to restore public trust. Both Tribune and Defender coverage of institutional statements, press conferences, and interviews directed public discourse toward a new dominant consensus: justice has been served and police reform is underway. Underlying this discourse is the assumption that City and judicial leaders will hold other institutions accountable to reform, thus pushing for a return to institutional trust and an end to the conjunctural crisis.