Mayor Lori Lightfoot joined community leaders at a news conference Thursday afternoon and called for calm, just hours before the video showing police fatally shooting 13-year-old Adam Toledo was to be released.
The video release came one day after a private meeting between the city’s top attorney and lawyers for the 13-year-old’s family.
“We live in a city that is traumatized by a long history of police violence and misconduct,” Lightfoot said.
“It is certainly understandable why so many of our residents are feeling that all-too-familiar surge of outrage and pain. And it’s even clearer that trust between our communities and law enforcement is far from healed and remains badly broken,” she added.
“This lack of trust makes it even for more difficult for many of us to wait and hear all the facts before making up our minds . . . I urge each resident who cares, and loves this city, let’s wait until we hear all the facts.”
Lightfoot recalled that as president of the Police Board, “it was my job for many years to investigate police-involved shootings. These videos and these moments are never easy to bear witness to, regardless of the circumstances. And what I’ve learned is, you need to brace yourself beforehand. Let yourself feel the pain and anguish and the shock of these traumatic events to avoid becoming numb as you watch.”
Lightfoot called for the community to give Adam’s family “space to breathe,” adding: “No parent should ever have a video broadcast widely of their child’s last moments ... much less be placed in the terrible situation of losing their child in the first place.”
Also at the City Hall news conference were leaders from the Little Village neighborhood, where the shooting occurred.
“We all must proceed with deep empathy and calm, and, importantly, peace,” Lightfoot said. The Little Village community, she said, “has stepped up in incredible ways and wrapped their arms around this family.”
Rick Estrada, president of Metropolitan Family Services, who spoke after the mayor, said he was raised five blocks from where Adam was shot and killed.
“A 13-year-old boy’s life was taken, and his future was taken from him — and that’s, I think, the story that we all have to keep in our mind,” Estrada said.
“We are all, each and every one of us, complicit in our inability to give this boy the future, and his family the future, that this young man — young boy — deserved.”
Hours before the videos were scheduled to be released by the Civilian Office of Police Accountability, Lightfoot issued a joint statement with Toledo family attorneys Adeena Weiss Ortiz and Joel Hirschhorn describing the private meeting the attorneys held Wednesday with Acting Corporation Counsel Celia Meza.
It stated that “both parties agree that all material should be released, including a slowed-down compilation of the events of March 29 that resulted in the tragic death” of 13-year-old Adam Toledo.
“We acknowledge that the release of this video is the first step in the process toward the healing of the family, the community and our city,” the statement said.
“We understand that the release of this video will be incredibly painful and elicit an emotional response to all who view it and we ask that people express themselves peacefully.”
The joint statement went on the say that COPA’s investigation is “ongoing” in an effort to “determine the full facts in this case.” The mayor and Toledo family attorneys asked for “full cooperation” with that investigation.
“We remain committed to working together toward reform. We ask that you continue to respect the Toledo family’s privacy during this incredibly painful and difficult time,” the statement said.
COPA’s release of the Toledo shooting video could not come at a more difficult time.
The city is already bracing for protests tied to a verdict in the Derek Chauvin trial in Minneapolis for the murder of George Floyd.
And protests erupted earlier this week in a suburb outside Minneapolis after a white female police officer — who, according to her police chief, apparently grabbed her service revolver instead of her Taser — shot and killed 20-year-old Black motorist Daunte Wright.
The Chicago Police Department has canceled days off for thousands of officers in specialized units and is poised to shift thousands more officers to 12-hour shifts in preparation for protests tied to the Toledo shooting video.
The mayor also scheduled private showings of the shooting video for City Council committee chairmen hours before the public release.
Days after the Toledo shooting, Lightfoot vowed to hunt down and hold accountable adults responsible for “putting a gun into the hands” of the teenager.
In promising to hold adults accountable for the circumstances surrounding Toledo’s death, Lightfoot went further than the Chicago Police Department has been willing to go.
At the time, CPD has said only that a gun was found near Toledo’s body. Neither police nor the Civilian Office of Police Accountability, which is investigating the shooting, had said Toledo was holding the gun or aiming it at police when he was chased, shot and killed.
That information was disclosed later by the Cook County State’s attorney’s office at a hearing for the 21-year-old who was with Toledo the night that he died.
“Let’s be clear. An adult put a gun in a child’s hand. A young and impressionable child. And one who should not have been provided with lethal force. A weapon that could and did irreparably change the course of his life,” the mayor said then.
“This happens way too often in our city. And it’s way past time for us to say, ‘No more.’ I have directed the superintendent and the chief of detectives to use every resource to track down the origins of this gun through tracing, fingerprinting and DNA and any other means and to find the person responsible for giving it to Adam. I want to bring that person or persons responsible for putting that gun in Adam’s hands to justice.”
On the same day, Lightfoot said she has directed CPD Supt. David Brown to draft and implement a new foot pursuit policy in time for the traditional summer surge of violence. Noting that Toledo was shot and killed during a foot pursuit, the mayor said foot pursuits present a “significant safety issue” for police, those pursued and for innocent bystanders.
“It is one of the most dangerous things that they engage in. 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. “It’s way past time that we reckon with this reality that happens literally multiple times every day across many neighborhoods in our city hundreds of times a year.”
The city, in fact, has been reforming its foot-pursuit policy for several years since the Department of Justice in 2017 issued a damning report about “poor police practices” in Chicago, including “tactically unsound foot pursuits.”
The report said such pursuits sometimes ended in police shooting people being chased just because they ran away and not because they were suspected of a serious crime. Adrenaline and fatigue were listed as factors in cops shooting people in foot chases, the report said.
That Justice Department report led to a court-ordered consent decree requiring hundreds of reforms to police practices, including foot chases. The latest report from an independent monitor for the consent decree said the police were close to complying with those requirements for foot chases, including better training and tracking foot pursuits that end in the use of force.
Between March 2020 and the end of the year, there were more than 1,300 such pursuits, 382 of which involved the use of force by a police officer, the monitor’s report said.
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