CHICAGO — On a bleak stretch of road outside a Burger King four years ago, a white police officer opened fire on a black teenage boy. Captured on a dashboard camera, the killing reshaped Chicago.

The officer, Jason Van Dyke, became the city’s first patrolman in almost 50 years to be convicted of murder. The teenager, Laquan McDonald, became a national symbol of police brutality. The city’s police department, one of the country’s largest, was overhauled. And the powerful mayor, battered by the fallout, stunned Chicago by announcing he would not run again.

On Friday, Mr. Van Dyke, an officer no longer, was sentenced to just shy of seven years in an Illinois prison for second-degree murder and 16 counts of aggravated battery with a firearm, one for every bullet he fired on that October night in 2014. Though an appeal is possible, the sentence provided a measure of finality in a case that dominated Chicago’s news cycles for years, laying bare this city’s racial divisions and upending its government.

But the final chapter left few people satisfied.

Laquan’s great-uncle, the Rev. Marvin Hunter, said it was a qualified victory that a police officer was going to prison for murder. But he said the sentence was far too short, and reduced Laquan to “a second-class citizen.”

William Calloway, an activist who had pressed for the release of the video in 2015, said that he was “heartbroken” by the sentence of 81 months.

Mr. Van Dyke “deserves to spend the rest of his life behind bars,” he said. “That’s a slap in the face to us and a slap on the wrist to him.”

But Mr. Van Dyke’s family had pleaded for leniency. His lawyers submitted to the judge dozens of letters from supporters, including a plea from one of his two daughters, who said she fell into a depression after the verdict.

“It’s time for him to hug and kiss his wife and protect his family,” the daughter, who is in high school, wrote to Judge Vincent Gaughan. “Bring my dad home.”

In the end, Judge Gaughan, of the Cook County Circuit Court, acknowledged that “this is a tragedy for both sides.”

“This is not pleasant and this is not easy,” Judge Gaughan said in delivering his ruling.

Mr. Van Dyke’s sentencing comes only one day after the acquittals of three fellow police officers who were accused of attempting to cover up his crime, a ruling that left many Chicagoans stunned and furious. And even with Mr. Van Dyke’s conviction and sentence, there remained an unsettled question in Chicago of whether anything in the police department — and what many see as a decades-old “code of silence” in which officers conceal and conspire to protect their own — had really changed.

For several hours in a cramped courtroom on Friday, residents who had filed complaints against Mr. Van Dyke years ago testified for the prosecution about those encounters. One man said he had been called the N-word. Another cried and said he had to undergo surgery after being manhandled. Another, a young black man who said he was wrongly arrested, chuckled and said, “He’s definitely in the right attire” when asked to identify Mr. Van Dyke in the courtroom.

Mr. Hunter, the spokesman for the McDonald family, told Judge Gaughan how he had used Laquan’s final paycheck from his construction job, issued four days after his death, to buy the suit the teenager was buried in.

“Please think about me and about my life when you sentence this person to prison,” Mr. Hunter said in court, reading a statement written from the perspective of Laquan. “Why should this person who has ended my life forever because he chose to become judge, jury and executioner — and has never asked for forgiveness — be free when I am dead.”

Mr. Van Dyke, who has grown a patchy beard and become noticeably thinner since going to jail, sat expressionless throughout much of Friday’s testimony. He wore a faded yellow jail jumpsuit. And when he entered and exited the courtroom, he clasped his hands behind his back, flanked by sheriff’s deputies.

Jurors convicted Mr. Van Dyke in October of second-degree murder and 16 counts of aggravated battery with a firearm, one for each bullet he fired. Prosecutors asked Judge Gaughan to sentence him to at least 18 years in prison. Mr. Van Dyke’s lawyers suggested probation.

Just before learning his sentence, Mr. Van Dyke rose and read a short statement.

Shooting Laquan was “the last thing I ever wanted to do,” said Mr. Van Dyke, who spoke softly and read from a piece of paper. “People have the right to judge my actions, however no one knows what I was thinking in that critical moment.”

Afterward, Joseph McMahon, the special prosecutor, said he was satisfied with the sentence even though it was much less than what he had sought.

“It strikes a balance between holding Jason Van Dyke accountable and also recognizing his service as a police officer,” Mr. McMahon said. He said the “system worked” and that “justice was served for Jason Van Dyke.”

And though his lawyers had requested probation, Daniel Herbert, a lawyer for Mr. Van Dyke, said his client “truly felt great.”

“He was not just relieved: he was happy,” he said.

[Was the Laquan McDonald case a turning point or an aberration?]

Mr. Van Dyke and Laquan came to personify the decades of tension between the Chicago police and the city’s African-American residents. Last year’s trial was seen by many Chicagoans as a referendum on whether officers could ever be held accountable for taking a life. Nervous crowds gathered across the city to listen to the verdict and broke out into chants of “Justice for Laquan!” when the court clerk read out “guilty” over and over.

Laquan’s death at first stirred little public outcry and only cursory media coverage. That changed more than a year later when Mr. Van Dyke, 40, was charged with murder and when police dashboard camera video was released showing Laquan, who was carrying a knife, veering away from the police before crumpling to the street as the gunshots started.

Protesters marched repeatedly in the weeks that followed, forcing out the Chicago police superintendent, successfully pushing for policy changes and weakening Mayor Rahm Emanuel, whose administration had fought to keep the video out of public view.

More than four years after Laquan’s death, the case continues to shape policing and politics in Chicago. The Police Department agreed last year to a court-enforced consent decree after a federal investigation found a pattern of discrimination. Mr. Emanuel, a Democrat whose term ends this year, announced on the eve of Mr. Van Dyke’s trial that he would not seek re-election. And on Thursday, three Chicago officers charged with conspiring to cover up the circumstances of Laquan’s death were acquitted in a separate trial, leading some activists to lament a police “code of silence” that even Mr. Emanuel has acknowledged to be pervasive.

“We cannot improve the safety of our communities if our police force is not held accountable for its actions and the very real culture of the code of silence goes unpunished,” Toni Preckwinkle, a leading candidate in a large field of mayoral hopefuls, said in a statement after Thursday’s verdicts. On Friday, she said that the justice system had “failed Laquan.”

“Chicago cannot move forward when law enforcement is not held accountable,” she said in a statement. “The two sentences this week show the bias, lack of equity and police code of silence in our criminal justice system.”

[Read more about how the officers were found not guilty of conspiring to protect Mr. Van Dyke.]

At Mr. Van Dyke’s trial, prosecutors played the dashboard camera video for jurors over and over. They showed gruesome autopsy photographs. They emphasized that Mr. Van Dyke was the only officer to fire his gun.

“It wasn’t the knife in Laquan’s hand that made the defendant kill him that night,” a prosecutor, Jody Gleason, said during closing arguments. “It was his indifference to the value of Laquan’s life.”

A longtime officer who had never been involved in a shooting before, Mr. Van Dyke testified in his own defense, growing emotional at times and insisting that he acted as he was trained. “I just kept on looking at that knife and I shot at it,” he told jurors, who were ultimately unswayed.

In the rare instances when other American police officers have been convicted in deadly shootings, sentences have varied greatly. Peter Liang, a former New York City officer found guilty of manslaughter, was sentenced to probation and community service in 2016. Roy Oliver, a former Texas officer, received a 15-year prison term last year for murder. David Warren, a former New Orleans officer convicted in the killing of an unarmed civilian after Hurricane Katrina, received a term of 25 years and nine months.

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