Chicago Police Murdered Adam Toledo
https://socialistaction.org/2021/06/17/chicago-police-murdered-adam-toledo/
June 17, 2021
By Cristobal Cavazos
Thirteen-year old Adam Toledo was shot to death in the Mexican working
class neighborhood of Little Village, among the most poverty stricken in
Chicago. CPD officer Eric Stillman did this heinous deed on March 29,
but a Chicago police cover-up reported otherwise. Months later video
footage showed Stillman shooting an unarmed Toledo, whose hands were
raised high above his head. Community outrage soon after boiled over
with angry protests demanding justice while questioning whether the
police had rigged the scene with a planted gun.
The CPD’s initial account claimed that an “armed confrontation” with
police was in progress and that young Toledo was armed at the time.
Stillman’s report stated that “The deceased did not follow verbal
direction” — and that he faced an “imminent threat of battery with
weapon.” The report continued, “The subject (Toledo) “used force likely
to cause death or great bodily harm.” All lies! The Toledo family’s
attorney, Adeena Weiss-Ortiz, described the killing as an “assassination.”
On April 17, 2021, Kim Foxx, the Cook County state’s attorney, announced
an investigation into why the prosecutor’s earlier descriptions of the
shooting hadn’t matched the video. Later that day, Foxx’s office
announced James Murphy, the prosecutor who had provided the “misleading”
description of the video, would be placed on administrative leave. Foxx
later admitted that she didn’t watch the full video and hadn’t reviewed
Murphy’s statements prior to the court hearing.
Illinois State Rep. Edgar Gonzalez, whose district includes Little
Village, said, “If you put your hands up, they shoot. If you put your
hands down, they shoot. If you walk, you run, you hide, you sleep, you
do exactly as they say, they still shoot. What are we supposed to do?”
Rutgers professor Lilia Fernández, who teaches Latino-Chicano History,
says police brutality toward the Latino community is, “not a new
phenomenon.” Said Fernández. “Adam Toledo would not be dead today if he
were white, if he were from an affluent family or if he lived in a
predominantly white neighborhood.”
In 2017, the U.S. Department of Justice issued a report concluding that
Chicago’s police had long engaged in using excessive force, especially
against minorities. Two years later, the City of Chicago agreed to
hundreds of recommended Department of Justice changes in its policing
policies. The consent decree agreement was a product of the government’s
investigation into the Police Department’s decades-long record of racist
practices. Yet, for all the new rules and regulations on the books today
the racist character of Chicago policing, as with the systemic racism
that is inherent in every institution in capitalist system, will remain
essentially unchanged.
Despite the myriad high profile police murders of Black and Latino
victims in recent decades no real changes have occurred. Since June 2020
U.S. police have killed people of different ethnicities at virtually the
same rate as they have for the past five years, according to several
studies. On average, not a day passes when an unarmed person of color is
not murdered by cops.
Toledo’s murder was widely seen as symptomatic of routine police terror
in Chicago’s working class Black and Brown neighborhoods. The
cop-enforced dictatorship of violence is well known. Protecting ruling
class interests and the local oligarchy – who increasingly militarize
their enforcers – is the rule. Intimidation, brutality, corruption and
murder in communities of color, especially aimed at the youth, are the
daily routine. Those like Toledo, who resist, by running away, are
rounded up for future persecution, or murdered outright.
Chicago poet Kevin Coval, author of “A People’s History of Chicago,”
said it well, “The gangsters are the entire establishment.”
Today, outraged community groups are demanding drastic action against
killer cops. Latino and African-American community organizations,
including the Chicago Alliance Against Racist and Political Repression,
are demanding justice. Many are calling for passage of the Empowering
Communities for Public Safety ordinance that is purported to give
communities a decisive role in shaping public safety in their
neighborhoods and establishing a semblance of their authority over
Chicago police – supposedly creating a pathway for community control.
Many are doubtful.
What is clear is that in one of the most economically unequal and
segregated cities in the U.S. the police are increasingly empowered by
the ruling class to violently corral whole working class neighborhoods
of color, which are often adjacent to affluent neighborhoods of the
white middle class moving in from the suburbs. The idea is to keep the
unwanted people of color out.
Meanwhile city planners work with banks and corporations behind the
scenes to further gentrify neighborhoods and drive poor people of color
out of their own neighborhoods. A similar process in underway in nearby
Pilsen as Starbucks replace the Supermercado.
The “Polimigra” Immigration Cops
Latino organizations have pointed to the phenomenon of “Polimigra,”
essentially cop immigration enforcers in Latino neighborhoods, similar
to and in alliance with La Migra at the border. True to their origin in
the slave patrols along the Mason-Dixon line and as security forces to
keep immigrants from going “beyond the pale,” that is, beyond their
ghetto boundaries of immigrant neighborhoods, the message is clear,
Don’t even think about resisting your assigned role as low wage,
preferably undocumented, zero rights workers. And for youth like Adam
Toledo, born here, growing up in Little Village neighborhoods of poverty
– Obey the blue line of police tyranny or drown in it!
Activists and people of conscience must take action for a program of
liberation of working class youth of color in their cities and towns.
Where Do We Go From Here?
We begin with the proposition that the term police reform is an
oxymoron. Adam Toledo’s murder by killer cop Eric Stillman was no
exception or accident or “mistaken” last second judgment error. His
bullets and Derek Chauvin’s knee have been on our necks for four
centuries. Their historic police ancestors emerged with the slave
patrols of yesteryear. They were the post-Civil War police who arrested
en masse Black Code designated “vagrants,” turned into instant prisoners
then transferred to plantation chain gangs to work free for former slave
owners; they were the racist Bull Connor heads of Birmingham’s Public
Safety Commission hired to enforce the state’s “separate but equal” Jim
Crow laws; they were and remain the scab-herding cops employed to break
union strikes and club civil rights demonstrators. They are all part of
the system’s inherent function to maintain the social order of the few
against the vast majority. They are the enforcers of the
school-to-prison scenario and the increasingly privatized U.S.
prison-industrial complex that incarcerates a greater number and
percentage of its population than any country on earth.
U.S. society’s systemic racism cannot be fundamentally altered by
toothless “community control” ordinances. Without profound changes in
relations of power between the oppressors and the oppressed, between the
one percent who own nearly half the wealth of the nation and the vast
majority who live pay check to paycheck, and the Black, Latinx and
Native Americans who are compelled to live on much less, not much will
change.
Democratic Community Control: The Right of Self-Determination
The right of Black, Brown and Native American people to control and
govern their own lives and communities will only begin in earnest with
this fundamental change in relations of power. This can emerge today
with the formation of new, united and independent organizations
dedicated to the freedom struggle in all its manifestations.
The struggle to disarm, defund, and disband the racist institutions of
police power will begin with organized and democratic community control
of the communities of the oppressed, by the oppressed themselves. Only
in this context can the $billions spent on the institutions of racist
police repression be used to defend and safeguard our interests not theirs.
The $trillions spent on bailing out the corporate elite, and the
$trillions more transferred to them in “tax reform” bills must be spent
on re-building the nation’s poor neighborhoods, inner cities, and tribal
lands.
The movement we aspire to build will be based on the mobilized
organizations of the oppressed themselves in alliance with all exploited
working people, as opposed to utopian notions that the racist police
institutions of the one percent’s cop enforcers can be reformed or
transformed from enemies to friends. That job can only reside when the
communities of the oppressed are organized to govern their own lives on
the streets and in the political arena.
The example of the most poor and oppressed uniting to advance their
freedom struggle has already inspired working people of all races and
creeds to join in wholeheartedly. The courageous spectacle of
unprecedented numbers of inspired white youth standing firm and side by
side with their Black, Latinx and Native American sisters and brothers
last summer, in defiance of curfews, police clubs and exploding noxious
gas grenades, portends wondrous victories to be won now and in the
immediate future. The 20 million strong Black Lives Matter mobilizations
in the streets in 2,000 U.S. cities, joined by the Latino community in
full force, did more to expose capitalism’s systemic racism and open the
door to fundamental social change than all the empty utterances of the
Democratic Party. The latter moved with full force to channel the power
of the mass movement into the safe channels of capitalist politics
wherein the former cohort of the Congressional southern racist bigots of
past decades, Joseph Biden, became instantly transformed into today’s
promised savior of the most oppressed. We need our own leaders, rooted
in our own struggles for freedom and equality, and pledged to challenge
the system itself.
The CPD’s initial account claimed that an “armed confrontation” with
police was in progress and that young Toledo was armed at the time.
Stillman’s report stated that “The deceased did not follow verbal
direction” — and that he faced an “imminent threat of battery with
weapon.” The report continued, “The subject (Toledo) “used force likely
to cause death or great bodily harm.” All lies! The Toledo family’s
attorney, Adeena Weiss-Ortiz, described the killing as an “assassination.”
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Irvin D. Yalom “Truth," Nietzsche continued, "is arrived at through
disbelief and skepticism, not through a childlike wishing something were
so! Your patient's wish to be in God's hands is not truth. It is simply
a child's wish—and nothing more! It is a wish not to die, a wish for the
eveastingly bloated nipple we have labeled 'God'! Evolutionary theory
scientifically demonstrates God's redundancy—though Darwin himself had
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you must realize that we created God, and that all of us together now
have killed him.” ― Irvin D. Yalom, When Nietzsche Wept