A new year, another reminder of how wildly incompetent and irreparably dangerous the Chicago Police Department remains. On Thursday, after a week of coast-to-coast news about extrajudicial police killings, the Chicago PD finally released bodycam footage showing that 13-year-old Adam Toledo had dropped a handgun and began raising his hands less than a second before a cop shot and killed him in March.
That is very different from what Cook County Assistant State’s Attorney James Murphy said just last weekend, when he asserted that footage showed the seventh-grader stopping during his confrontation with Officer Eric Stillman, but refusing to show his hands. While Cook County State’s Attorney Kim Foxx now says her prosecutor was not “fully informed,” he went so far as to say that Toledo, who is Latinx, turned towards Stillman, who is white, with a gun.
Now that the footage is out it begs the same question cops and prosecutors always seem to: Who are you going to believe? Me or your lying eyes?