He was a 13-year-old seventh grader at Gary Elementary School. He was also a 13-year-old with a gun being chased by cops down a dark alley late at night. There’s an inexplicable compulsion to turn victims into saints these days. They’re not. They don’t have to be. Even kids who do bad things shouldn’t be needlessly killed. Adam Toledo was doing bad things, even though he was just a 13-year-old seventh grader. That shouldn’t have been the case, but it was. And he still shouldn’t have been shot and killed.
From the video and other stills, it appears that there was a gun in his hands, which was found behind the fence, on the ground a few feet away. As the video shows, this was one of those “split second” things the Supreme Court loves to talk about.
The cop, Eric Stillman, ordered him to drop the gun, to put his hands up. He did. He was then shot and killed.
There are some who would call this an execution. That’s both unfair and inaccurate. The police were responding to a call of “shots fired,” giving them reason to believe that the threat of harm was real. They arrested a 21-year-old man when Toledo took off. Stillman chased him down the alley, yelling at him to stop, He did, but only when he got to a place where he could toss the gun and then put his hands up.
Yet, Toledo was still shot.
Did Stillman make the decision to shoot and then was unable to process the “split second” when a child with a gun turned and put his hands up? Was it too much to demand of a cop that he be capable of not pulling the trigger, reversing course, in that split second between the moment he decides to shoot and the moment his target surrenders?
To be fair, officers and their friends will argue that we can demand too much of them, as human beings are subject to the limits of human performance, comprehension, processing and action. And cops are human beings. So are the people they shoot. This is a rather significant detail that seems too often to only be honored in the breach.
But the answer to whether the dark alley, adrenaline pumping, split-second decision making is reason to forgive the cop his shot must be no. There was enough time for Adam Toledo to toss the gun, turn around, raise his empty hands in the air. That must be enough time for a police officer to not kill him.
The authority to take the life of another human being does not come without its hard burdens. Cops are supposed to be trained to distinguish these moments. Cops must be capable of distinguishing these moments, as their legitimacy depends on it, not on the performance limits of someone in whom society would not repose the trust to be handed deadly weapons and authorized to use them. That’s not good enough.
From the cop side, they should want this to be unacceptable. If the admonition is to comply with their commands and everyone will live, then this can’t be justifiable to a cop either. What this video shows, and what people will take away when they see it, is that compliance is no assurance that you won’t be killed. And if a cop is going to kill you whether you comply or not, then there’s no incentive not to shoot the cop. Just as the cops like to say, so too will anyone else: Better to be judged by twelve than carried by six.
If a cop wants to live, then he must want Adam Toledo to live as well. If Stillman’s shoot was good, or even understandable, then why would anyone who also hopes to live not do what he has to do to prevent Stillman from killing him? This may not have been an execution. Stillman’s killing Toledo may not have been the product of any malice. But this was a bad shoot, a terrible shoot, and it should not have happened. This can’t happen.
As you noted on Twitter, there are answers between excess policing and no policing—and there are answers between murder convictions for the police and nothing.
Self-defense as a criminal defense doesn’t require certainty or even absolute correct assessment; the Illinois statute says: “A person is justified in the use of force against another when and to the extent that he reasonably believes that such conduct is necessary to defend himself or another against such other’s imminent use of unlawful force.” We should neither raise nor lower that standard for police officers. From that standard, the officer’s actions looks like self-defense.
But civil liability and firing both apply lower standards than criminal liability. There’s a solid case that this officer acted negligently, and was poorly trained, by responding to Toledo’s flight in such a way that even when Toledo complied with his orders, the officer thought Toledo was about to shoot him. Even on the right, few would object to this officer’s having to find a new career, and Chicago paying a sizable settlement to the grieving family. Which is probably what will happen.
There’s a reason why I don’t raise either culpability or liability in the post.
That USA Today footage is quite misleading. They intentionally slow down the video at the moment of confrontation, and show a still shot of the moment the kid has his hands up, implying the officer had time to see this and decided to shoot. The officer was already pulling the trigger as Toledo’s hands were going up. Toledo tossed the gun and turned around with his hands up in one motion, it all happened in under one second. The cop was probably spooked, thinking that Toledo was turning around to shoot him, since he doesn’t have X-Ray vision to see the gun thrown behind the fence.
Maybe the officer should have given better orders, maybe he shouldn’t have put himself in such a dangerous position to begin with, I don’t really know. But I don’t think you can say clear cut the kid complied but got killed anyway. The kid wasn’t complying up until the moment it looked like he was about to turn around and shoot at the cop. Shit situation all around.
I tried to use the original body cam footage which shows what happened in real time, but YouTube would let me embed it and required viewers to go there to see it. This is one of the problems with an unduly sensitive society and demanding the Youtube protect our eyes from reality.
That said, my views are based on the original footage. As for the officer “already pulling the trigger as Toledo’s hands were going up,” that’s your imagination working overtime. No one is complying until they comply. That’s how compliance works.
I have to wonder what effect, if any, the fact that his flashlight was on strobe setting had on his perception?
I suspect this will one issue for the “experts” to hash out if this goes to trial.
Are the teen’s hands still rising after the blood appears on his shirt? Any idea of what point in the sequence of the teen’s motions when the cop pulled the trigger? Was the teens still turning around? Was he just beginning to raise his hands? Were his hands already up? I tried to figure it out but I lack the ability to make a reasonable guess. [I’m asking, not making a statement.]
Malcolm Gladwell (don’t judge me) wrote in his new book something that’s actually useful in how one views these situations: You can look at it from 10,000 feet or you can look at it frame by frame. The former sees the forest but not the trees. The latter sees the trees but not the forest.
Single shot suggests AD by an excited officer.
Eerily similar to LaQuan McDonald in the sense that the video, once released, doesn’t match the police account.
Looks like Chicago hasn’t changed much.
The shirt was truly unfortunate.
That it was a single shot is a very interesting detail that cuts both ways. If he believed his shoot was justified, he would have kept firing (I believe the sequence is three shots under current protocol?). If he stopped, he realized between shot one and two that he screwed up.
> If he stopped, he realized between shot one and two that he screwed up.
Or earlier. He could have perceived the surrender before firing that first shot, but too late to stop himself.
So as a tree observer …
If an officer observes an action within a dangerous context and decides that the action is cause to shoot, but in the subsequent fractional seconds the suspect acts in a way that can be perceived as compliance, is the human mind able to observe and comprehend with confidence during those fractional seconds and is the human nervous system able to deliver new instructions to prohibit the shot? As a (retired) deer hunter, I cannot imagine reacting so quickly without also raising the likelihood of misunderstanding the subsequent action (i.e., it turns out to be dangerous rather than safe). Surely training as a hunter is different from training to kill people, yet the human mind and body are constrained in either situation. Whitetail deer act quickly by instinct. A hunter is not able to match its speed. How much training does it take for a police officer to overcome his or her natural limitations?
Who can adjudicate this tragic situation in a way that satisfies everyone? Our self-indulgent society demands that SOMEONE is at fault, correct? Is it possible to attain a fair judgment?
It’s painfully obvious that these shootings cannot be ignored. Every day I pray to be more aware. Maybe I should stop offering this silly prayer. These incidents are distressing even to a callous redneck like me.
Greenfield the mind reader…
I bet you do that shit in court and on the Twitters too.
I am impressed….
I agree with everything you’ve said – except the part about this kid doing bad things. Perhaps I have not learned enough about the case, but, growing up in a rural area, around guns to some extent, handling guns, and shooting off a few rounds, sometimes in non-optimal places, was just normal behavior. High school kids took guns to school – it was not allowed, no gun clubs in my liberal suburban Republican county with a rural fringe, we lived in the rural fringe) but people did it, and no one freaked out about it, because they knew the kid brought it just to show it off.
So, this kid may have been the worst gangster in Chicago for all I know, but he could have been just a kid curious about guns who accidentally let off a round, and had no bad intentions towards anyone.
I bring this up because I see the cops freaking out, determined to catch someone, taking big risks for themselves and their quarry, when there was gunfire, but so far, no clear indication of any crime victim.
I used to hear gunshots in my blue collar San Francisco Bay Area city all the time, but there was no street crime there – people shooting in their backyards -not a great idea, but nothing to freak out over, and indeed, if no one assumed gunshots meant a serious crime had taken place, there would have been no 911 calls, and no kid getting shot, in this case.
When you view the gun itself as evil, and therefore everyone who has one as evil, or at least a major threat, taking extreme actions like this one make sense. A calmer attitude about guns might be lead away from these tragedies.
I don’t think he was a rural Chicago kid with a healthy interest in guns. I might have described him as a gangbanger, but I don’t know that to be the case although that’s been alleged. That said, his possession of a gun was not likely for a research project.
You assume the time for the kid to toss the gun and raise his hands must be enough time for the officer to divine the kid’s intentions after he had just been running from a cop with a gun in his hand. Maybe it isn’t and this is what we get. How are you sure you aren’t asking the cops to be impossibly superhuman in declaring this specific instance a “terrible shoot”? I hope Mr. Prickett weighs in.
Naturally, I’m way more concerned about myself becoming a cop-apologist and agreeing with the Supreme Court. That I don’t see what you do watching the same tape bothers me. I want to condemn the cop, but can’t. Help.
Is the question “how long did the cop have to process” the surrender or “at the time the officer decided to pull the trigger, what was the situation as he understood it to be.” Yes, Toledo had a gun. The gun was not pointed at him. Prepare to fire? Absolutely. Pull the trigger? Not until he sees the “glint of steel” moving in his direction. Remember Tamir Rice, who had a fraction of a second before being ordered to drop the gun and being killed?
The Tamir Rice shooting was justified.
I haven’t watched the original, full speed video, but from both the article and the comments, it appears as this was a justified shooting.
We still disagree about Tamir Rice, but we’ve been through that already.
Well that resolves the identity of that anonymous blogger.
I get the “tie goes to the cop” view, not that I necessary agree with it, but here he’s playing amateur horseshoes? Your latitude to your formers seems a bit inconsistent.
There are stories about truly blameless citizens meeting a bad end at the hands of the police. In my opinion, this one muddies the water.
There was no opportunity for Stillman to know the demographic points in Toledo’s story that get everyone fired up. He was chasing a suspect with a gun with evidence it had been fired very recently.
Stopping people from firing weapons in the city, getting illegal weapons off the streets, and stopping gun violence…These are things we legitimately need the police to do. There is no scenario in which a suspect fires a weapon 8 times on the corner of a Chicago street at 2:30 AM, then runs when the police show up, that provides the officer a legitimate reason to think twice about doing what the public needs them to do.
My heart goes out to everyone involved and the most for Toledo’s family. I can imagine many scenarios that start with nothing more than a curious kid and a gun, but officer Stillman, in the moments before this shooting, had no way of knowing any of them. What came next is a tragedy beyond measure, but prosecuting Stillman in the aftermath of this shooting, given the facts as reported, is a bridge too far for even me.
Prosecuting Stillman isn’t on the table (yet). But the protests, riots, burning and looting are.
Right. And as you know, I’ve bled for the cause. I won’t be participating this time out, but mobs gonna mob. I know it’s expecting too much for LEOs to collectively contemplate what brought things to this point when the first salvo of less than lethal options is deployed, but they might consider it. Things can always get worse.
The kid accomplished what he was trying to do, which was to conceal his dropping the gun. That’s what got him killed, not “compliance.”
I agree that he stopped there because he could toss the gun, but that doesn’t change the fact that he raised his empty hands.
You got you a cite for “glint of steel” or is that some old school shit you learnrd watching Colombo reruns?
Dont worry they only let me out for two weeks…