Adam Toledo Complied

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.

Adam Toledo complied.

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.