Teen’s death puts focus on split-second decisions by police
It happened in less than a second.
Thirteen-year-old Adam Toledo dropped the gun he’d been holding, turned and began raising his hands just as the officer had commanded. Then the cop fired a single shot, killing the boy in the dark Chicago alley.
The graphic video that became the latest tragic touchstone in the nation’s reckoning with race and policing puts a microscope on those split-second decisions with far-reaching and grave consequences. Investigators are still sorting through exactly what happened, but the shooting has raised difficult questions about why the boy wasn’t given more time to comply and whether the deadly encounter could have been prevented in the first place.
“Time and again, our communities of color are being told that these are isolated incidents or that they are the fault of the suspect. What do you say when you see the evidence with your own eyes?” Jose Lopez, the League of United Latin American Citizens’ national vice president for the Midwest, said in a statement.
The white officer, Eric Stillman, was responding to reports of shots fired in Little Village, a predominantly Hispanic neighborhood of the city’s southwest side, around 3 a.m. March 29. Stillman’s jumpy, nighttime body camera footage shows him chasing Toledo, who was Latino, on foot down an alley for several seconds and yelling: “Police! Stop! Stop right [expletive] now!”
As the teen slows down, Stillman yells: “Hands! Hands! Show me your [expletive] hands!” Toledo then turns toward the camera, Stillman yells, “Drop it!” and midway between repeating that command, he fires and Toledo falls. Police found a gun next to a fence a short distance away after the shooting. Prosecutors have previously said a 21-year-old man with Toledo fired the rounds that originally drew the officer’s attention.
The Cook County state’s attorney’s office will decide whether Stillman, who has been placed on administrative leave for 30 days, should face charges. But it’s been rare to charge police with crimes in the death of civilians, and winning a conviction is harder in part because jurors are reluctant to second-guess an officer when the officer has been faced with a split-second decision in a lifeor-death situation.
The U.S. Supreme Court has said an officer’s fear for their life in the heat of the moment matters, even if in hindsight it turns out they weren’t in danger.