CHICAGO — Mayor Lori Lightfoot called for a new foot pursuit policy to be implemented by the Chicago Police Department before the start of summer after a city cop shot and killed 13-year old Adam Toledo last week following a chase.
On Monday, Lightfoot also called for an investigation into how the boy came into possession of a gun, saying an adult gave a weapon to a child and must be held accountable.
“This is a complicated story. It’s not my story to tell, particularly not as our understanding of the facts is evolving,” Lightfoot said. “What I do know and what I will say is Ms. Toledo and her family need our love and support in this moment, not our withering judgment.”
Lightfoot and Police Superintendent David Brown spoke at New Life Church in Little Village, as part of an event aimed at calming the city ahead of the video’s eventual release.
“This is a tragedy. The most tragic of circumstances,” Brown said. “Let’s not make it worse by rushing to judgment.”
He focused his remarks on why officials didn’t divulge Adam’s age or identity publicly for three days after the shooting. Brown added to information already provided by the police department on Friday by saying that on March 26, Adam’s mother walked into the Ogden District station, reported him missing at 6:58 p.m. and the information was entered in a police database at 7:18 p.m.
The next day, a detective followed up with Adam’s mother, Elizabeth Toledo, she said he returned home and her son’s name was removed from police department records as him being missing, Brown said.
After Adam was killed, a 21-year-old man, Ruben Roman, was arrested at the scene. Brown said he provided police with a “phony name” and was charged with misdemeanor resisting arrest.
Brown said police fingerprinted Adam three times and found no records for him. Investigators combined through missing persons reports from the Ogden District and two North Side patrol districts, as well as reports of missing people who were eventually found at homes, said Brown.
On Wednesday, two days after Adam’s death, police contacted Adam’s mother about 1 p.m. and told her a description of her son matched that of an unidentified person at the Cook Cook County medical examiner’s Office, Brown said. His mother identified him at 3:30 p.m. that day at the medical examiner’s office.
“Ms. Toledo had not made a second missing-persons report,” Brown said.
Toledo, 13, was fatally shot at about 2:30 a.m. March 29 in a Little Village neighborhood alley by an on-duty officer responding to a call of shots fired in the area.
Lightfoot’s call for police changes comes four years after the U.S. Justice Department recommended in a report about CPD’s practices that it adopt a foot pursuit policy, none has been put into place despite concerns about how dangerous they can be for the officers and the public.
“They often get separated from their partners. Communication is difficult. You’re running through a dense urban environment, an alley, a street a backyard,” Lightfoot said of police officers at the news conference. “So, it’s way past time that we reckon with this reality that happens literally multiple times everyday across many neighborhoods in our city, hundreds of times a year.”
A Chicago Tribune investigation in 2016 found that foot chases played a role in more than a third of the 235 police shooting cases in the city from 2010 through 2015 that ended with someone wounded or killed. In 2017, the Justice Department’s investigation into Chicago’s police practices noted that foot pursuits are “inherently dangerous and present substantial risks to officers and the public.”
“Officers may experience fatigue or an adrenaline rush that compromises their ability to control a suspect they capture, to fire their weapons accurately, and even to make sound judgments,” the DOJ report stated in its report on its probe into Chicago police.
During Brown’s tenure as the Dallas, Texas, police chief from 2010 to 2016, that department developed a foot pursuit policy for officers following a controversial officer-involved shooting in 2012. At the time, that policy required Dallas police officers to not engage suspects alone during foot chases, but the policy was relaxed a few years later.
In 2018, Lightfoot criticized the draft of a consent decree the Chicago Police Department now finds itself under for saying a determination on whether a new policy was needed could wait until 2021. Speaking Monday, Lightfoot said a foot pursuit policy can’t be pushed off “for another day,” though she didn’t address why she hadn’t prioritized the issue in the nearly two years since she became mayor.
But, she said, CPD established guidelines for foot pursuits in February. Last month, the consent decree’s independent monitor completed an assessment of data related to Chicago Police foot pursuits and determined that the department should adopt a foot pursuit policy.
Meanwhile, police continue to detail what happened in Adam’s shooting.
The police department released some details of the encounter initially, including that the person shot by police was believed to have had a gun. On Friday, the Toledo family’s lawyer said that detail surprises Adam’s family.
“At this time, the family doesn’t have all the information,” the lawyer, Adeena Weiss Ortiz, told reporters Friday afternoon outside her law office in west suburban La Grange Park. “And they are encouraging the full cooperation of (the Civilian Office of Police Accountability) and the Chicago Police Department, and transparency in obtaining the video as soon as possible as mentioned by our mayor, Mayor Lori Lightfoot.”
Adding to the controversy surrounding the shooting was the fact that it took three days after the shooting for officials to acknowledge publicly that Adam was only 13, making him the youngest person in years to be shot and killed by Chicago police. The department on Friday, though, clarified why it took three days to announce a child had been shot.
After the teen was killed, officials had no way to immediately identify him because he was not carrying either an ID or a cellphone, the department has said. Detectives worked for about two days to identify Adam, including by searching through recent missing-persons reports and even canceled ones to see if a description matched to the person who had been shot, according to the department.
Adam’s mother had in fact reported him missing late last week, but the alert was canceled a day later when she told detectives he had returned home, the department said, adding that he was not reported missing a second time.
After detectives found that report, they saw the description matched and notified his mother at 1 p.m. Wednesday of the possibility that her son had been shot and asked her to view the body at the Cook County medical examiner’s office. She did that at 3:30 p.m., identifying her son, the police department said.
But it wasn’t until Thursday when the medical examiner’s office and the police department acknowledged that Adam was 13.
Weiss Ortiz, the Toledo family’s lawyer, didn’t have any information about the canceled missing-persons report. But she mentioned that Adam’s mother, Elizabeth Toledo, has been getting “messages from the community” about her being judged for what happened to her son, who had four other siblings and was a seventh grader at Gary Elementary School in Little Village.
“She wants to let you know that she was a full-time mom and a homemaker to five children, ages 11 to 24,” Weiss Ortiz said Friday of Adam’s mother.
COPA, which is investigating whether the officer who pulled the trigger was justified in shooting Adam, will likely show video footage of the shooting to the Toledo family later this week.
It’s unclear when the footage will be released publicly, but according to city policy, video of police-involved shootings, as well as the accompanying paperwork, must be made public within 60 days of the incident, unless officials request a 30-day extension after that.
Initially last week, COPA said it would be prohibited from releasing video of the shooting because Toledo was a minor and publicizing the footage would violate the state’s Juvenile Court Act. But on Friday, COPA announced there were legal avenues that allow the agency to release the video, deviating from a long-standing policy to withhold video of fatal police shootings of minors.
