Toledo shooting raises issues on police tactics
Lack of definitive foot-pursuit policy among the most pressing
The release of troubling video of 13-year-old Adam Toledo being fatally shot by a Chicago police officer rocked the city from the mayor’s office to the streets of Little Village but also left it in an all-too-familiar place.
Activists on social media demanded that the officer be criminally charged. A police official emphasized the officer’s body camera captured a gun less than a second before the shooting. Police reform experts called once again for a policy limiting foot pursuits. And yet another family mourned a loss.
Differences of opinion came despite the relatively swift release of videos depicting the chaotic moments on March 29 when Toledo and tactical Officer Eric Stillman, who had been responding to shots fired in the area, crossed paths in a dark alley.
Police had called the shooting an “armed confrontation,” but various camera angles viewed at slower speeds appeared to show the teen tossed the gun and was turning with his hands raised when the officer fired a single shot into his chest.
The videos seem to raise as many questions as they answered: When did the officer last see the gun in Toledo’s hand? Did the officer have time to process that the gun had been dropped and the danger abated? Was the teen even given a chance to comply with the officer’s commands?
Charles Ramsey, former
police chief in Washington, D.C., and Philadelphia who has spent years helping reform police policies, said he believed the officer acted appropriately.
“When you look at the entire picture, you wish to hell he hadn’t shot,” said Ramsey, who grew up in Chicago and served as a young patrolman in the same district where Toledo was killed.
“But at the time it happened, the split-second decisions that had to be made, it’s understandable. It’s tragic, but it’s understandable.”
But others were sharply critical of the officer’s actions.
“Officer Stillman’s yelling, ‘Show your hands ... drop it,’ and the boy does exactly as he’s instructed,” said Craig Futterman, a University of Chicago law professor who specializes in police accountability issues.
“He stops and he turns and he begins to ... put up his hands, empty hands toward the officer.”
Futterman said the teen was stopped and surrendering when he was shot.
“He was in the act of complying with what precisely the officer asked him to do,” Futterman said. “This was a split-second judgment. Did it have to be a split-second judgment?”
The path since Laquan McDonald
In many ways, the release of the videos in Toledo’s shooting showed how much has changed in the 5 ½ years since the public issue of the now-infamous video of a police officer killing Laquan McDonald, which sparked a major — though still largely incomplete — overhaul of the Chicago Police Department.
While the McDonald video was kept under wraps by City Hall for more than a year and only released after a court fight, the Civilian Office of Police Accountability on Thursday released a trove of evidence in the Toledo shooting just two weeks after the incident.
The nature of the evidence was starkly different as well. Unlike in McDonald’s shooting, which was captured only on a grainy police dashcam with no audio, Toledo’s death was up close and graphic.
The officer’s barking commands — “Show me your (expletive) hands!” followed by “Drop it!” — could clearly be heard. On a frame-by-frame viewing, a pistol-shaped object appears to be visible in Toledo’s right hand behind his back as he pauses near an opening in a fence and turns his head toward the officer.
Meanwhile, surveillance footage of the same moment from across a nearby parking lot showed Toledo stopping with his right arm behind the fence. He could be seen to make an underhanded throwing motion, just before he turned back toward the officer, and a gun was later discovered where Toledo appeared to toss it.
As the shot was fired, Toledo appeared to have faced the officer with his hands empty, lifting them to about his shoulders. The teen then crumpled to the ground, blood coming from his mouth as Stillman tried lifesaving measures before an ambulance arrived.
“Look at me. Look at me. You all right? … Where are you shot?” Stillman says.
Even before the official release of the videos, a still image leaked on Twitter depicting Toledo with his hands up was being used by advocates as Exhibit A that the shooting was unjustified. Many said it was further evidence that despite all the calls for reform since the McDonald case, police are too aggressive when it comes to chasing suspects in minority communities and too quick to shoot.
“If he had a gun, he tossed it,” Adeena Weiss Ortiz, an attorney representing Toledo’s family, said Thursday. “The officer said, ‘Show me your hands,’ (and Toledo) complied. (The officer) is trained to not shoot somebody unarmed. He is trained to look, he is trained not to panic.”
On the floor of the Illinois House on Friday, state Rep. Edgar Gonzalez, whose district includes the block where the shooting occurred, asked colleagues how residents in his community are supposed to follow orders when doing so means you might still get shot.
“So if you put your hands up, they shoot. If you put your hands down, they shoot,” Gonzalez said. “If you walk, you run, you hide, you sleep, you do exactly as they say, they still shoot. ... What the hell are we supposed to do?”
Experts weigh in
Adam Bercovici, a former Los Angeles police lieutenant, noted that Stillman was by himself when he ran after Toledo, which is a “tactical error.”
“When you do pursue a suspect by yourself and you’re alone, and you get into a confrontation, there’s a likelihood that deadly force is going to happen,” said Bercovici, who now works as a security consultant.
He thinks a foot-pursuit policy for Chicago cops could have prevented the shooting of Toledo.
“That’s a problem,” Bercovici said. “Chicago has a lot of violence right now. Suspects are going to run from the police. So if you don’t have a foot-pursuit policy ... you’re just making it up as you go.”
Bercovici said in LA, for example, police are very “perimeter-conscious,” which means that during searches for armed suspects, police might flood, or contain, a certain area with canine officers, a helicopter or other resources to get a
suspect to surrender.
“The basics behind training is don’t put yourself in a position where you have to use deadly force,” Bercovici said.
David Klinger, also a former LAPD officer and use-of-force expert, said it’s too early to determine whether the Toledo shooting was justified based solely on the video footage. But from what he’s seen in the footage, Stillman’s actions in the split-second before the shooting were not unreasonable, he said.
Klinger pointed to Stillman’s reaction in the footage to where it appears to show an object “consistent with the shape of a handgun” in Toledo’s right hand. He pointed to a portion of the footage when Stillman shouts, “Drop it,” and by the time Toledo is shot, there’s nothing in his right hand.
“So now the question becomes, you have a police officer who says, ‘Drop it,’ he sees, I would assume ... what I see ... and says to himself, ‘That’s a gun,’ ”said Klinger, a
criminology professor at the University of Missouri at St. Louis.
In the Toledo case, Klinger also noted that disciplinary investigators would likely be looking at all the video and audio evidence as well as the mindset of Stillman, among other things, at the time of the shooting. But Klinger said Stillman was not “out of control” during the confrontation.
One consequence already taking shape is a renewed call for instituting just such a Police Department policy on foot chases, which have been instituted in other big-city departments and were highlighted by the Justice Department as a problem in its civil rights probe into police practices in Chicago.
Sheila Bedi, a civil rights attorney from Northwestern University’s Pritzker School of Law who has been involved in Chicago police consent-decree litigation, was critical of CPD’s aggressive tactics, in particular foot pursuits. Under model policies, Toledo would not have been pursued at all, she said.
Bedi also pointed to the fact the officer was running alone down an alley at night. She said the critical guidance in foot-pursuit policies is to see if there is another, less aggressive way to respond to the suggested threat.
“The idea that good policing requires officers to engage in a foot pursuit in places with poor visibility ignores the realities of what we know about the realities of foot pursuits — that police have a whole lot of other tools at their disposals,” she said.
A more restrictive policy might sound like radical change in Chicago, but Bedi said that is because for far too many years Chicago has relied on chasing people to respond to crime and, in theory, make the city safer.
It is not working, she argued.
“The real irony here is that in allegedly responding to gun violence, CPD perpetuated gun violence,” she said. “And in a nutshell this is the story of policing.
“I think Adam’s tragic death presents an opportunity to reexamine the entire system of alleged public safety and recognize police do not play a role in keeping us safe.”
‘Our entire system failed Adam’
Whatever one’s view is of Toledo’s killing, it is clear the fallout is far from over.
Gov. J.B. Pritzker said told reporters Friday it was “abundantly clear that our entire system failed Adam,” and that authorities should move quickly to “investigate and adjudicate what happened that night in Little Village in the interest of justice and accountability.”
“The video of Adam’s death is devastating, just devastating,” Pritzker said at an event announcing federal child care funds coming to the state.
“It is unbearable to think of his family seeing these last moments of his life, and it is searing to know that a 13-year-old lost his life in this way.”
A 2016 Chicago Tribune investigation found that from 2010 through 2015, foot chases played a role in more than a third of the 235 shootings in which someone was wounded or killed by Chicago police.
In a news conference Thursday shortly before the Toledo footage was released, Mayor Lori Lightfoot reiterated her stance that foot pursuits are inherently dangerous and should be curtailed.
“Foot pursuits put everyone involved at risk, the officers, the person being pursued and bystanders,” Lightfoot said. “We have to do better, and I charge the (Chicago police) superintendent with bringing to me a policy that recognizes how dangerous this is. We can’t afford to lose more lives.”
Ramsey said he implemented a foot-chase policy during his time in Philadelphia, but it centered more on best practices by officers, such as making sure they have cover and are always in a spot where they can radio in their position. Any policy that would force officers to ignore someone running with a gun would be misguided, he said.
“You don’t tell people not to pursue someone who’s fleeing with a gun — that’s what cops do,” he said. “How about you don’t let them respond to calls at all? Shots fired? Guys running around with guns? We’ll deal with it in the morning.”
But other experts countered that an officer chasing an armed suspect alone down an alley is hardly the only alternative.
Across the country, foot-pursuit policies have been enacted to create balancing tests to ensure both officer and citizen safety.
Charlie Beck, longtime chief of Los Angeles Police Department and an interim superintendent in Chicago in early 2020, said he, like others, recommended that CPD write a foot-chase policy.
He said he hopes that such a policy emerges in the wake of the Toledo shooting.
“It’s safer for the public and for the officers,” Beck said. “Not having a policy places arrest ahead of everything. And there is always a balance. Police work is not going to always be safe, but you have to make it as safe as you can. And a more restrictive foot-pursuit policy can do that.”
“So if you put your hands up, they shoot. If you put your hands down, they shoot. If you walk, you run, you hide, you sleep, you do exactly as they say, they still shoot. ... What the hell are we supposed to do?”
— State Rep. Edgar Gonzalez, whose district includes the block where the shooting occurred