Crime will inevitably go up when cops can’t do their jobs

Two years ago, a white Chicago police officer named Eric Stillman fatally shot Adam Toledo, an unarmed 13-year-old Mexican American with no criminal record, while

complying with the officer’s orders following a late-night foot chase. The killing brought greater awareness to

brutality in Latino like this. On March 29, 2021, at 2:36 a.m., Stillman and his partner responded to a call that shots were being fired. Stillman pushed Ruben Roman, a 21-year-old with a criminal record, to the ground and chased Toledo, who was holding a 9 mm handgun, down a dark alley. Stillman yelled “drop it.” Toledo tossed the gun behind a fence and turned toward him. The officer fired the fatal shot less than a second after Toledo got rid of the gun. Stillman then immediately jumped to Toledo’s aid and called for an ambulance.

Roman was acquitted of firing the weapon at a passing car; his lawyers argued that it might have been Toledo who had fired the weapon.

Stillman was placed on administrative leave. Chicago’s interim police

Carter, recommended last week that Stillman be fired.

Homicides are, in fact, down in Chicago, but they remain at some of the highest rates since the 1990s, and overall crime spiked by 41% between 2021 and 2022. Last weekend alone, mass hooliganism overwhelmed Chicago’s downtown while 11 people were killed and 26 wounded in shootings across the city.

Maybe there’s a lesson in this, simple and old-fashioned as it may seem. When bad guys walk free and brave cops have to fear for their jobs for doing their jobs, crime tends to go up. And when the national conversation about the Adam Toledo tragedy revolves around the officer’s split-second, life-or-death decision instead of the question “What is a 13-year-old child doing with a 21-yearold criminal firing a gun at 2:30 a.m.?” then we are deeply confused about the nature of our problems, to say nothing of the way to a solution.

A similar dynamic is playing out in other big cities, too. Police morale is abysmal. One way in which this fact registers is in high levels of voluntary resignations and early retirements, leading to critical staffing shortages. As of mid-March, New Orleans had 944 police officers — down from 1,200 just three years ago, despite increased recruitment efforts. Last year the city registered 100% increase in shootings over 2019.

New Orleans isn’t alone. A recent academic analysis found that 11 out of the 14 cities it studied suffered from higher-than-expected losses to their police after the George Floyd protests of 2020, with Seattle losing the highest proportion of its force. One possible unfortunate result, the study suggests, is that, as good cops depart, the quality of newer recruits also suffers. That may help explain the appalling police brutality in the killing of Tyre Nichols in Memphis, Tennessee, in January.

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