I want to write a few words about the murder of Adam Toledo, a thirteen-year-old boy who was executed by the Chicago Police Department last month. I did not anticipate when I started this occasional newsletter that I would ever devote it to a subject as grave as this one, and there is a part of me that feels I shouldn’t write about this. There are people who have talked about it with more clarity and power than I will. I don’t live in Chicago anymore, and other people do.
Yet as a favorite thinker of mine said, “the need to let suffering speak is the condition of all truth.”
Adam Toledo was a thirteen-year-old boy who lived in Little Village, a neighborhood on the Southwest Side of Chicago. On the night of March 29th, police officers who were responding to a report of shots fired stopped Toledo and a friend in an alley. The two boys attempted to run away. An officer chased down Toledo and commanded him to stop. He did stop, turned around, and put up his hands. The officer fired a single shot that killed him.
Every moment of this can be seen as clear as glass in the body camera footage that the city police oversight agency has released this afternoon. Over the past few weeks, though, the city government has spun a very different story. A prosecutor who appeared in court on the city’s behalf claimed that Toledo was holding a gun. The mayor, Lori Lightfoot, posted a maudlin message that implied a gang had put the gun into Toledo’s hand: “gangs are preying on our most vulnerable, corrupting these young minds,” she said, later saying “an adult put a gun in a child’s hand.” The alderman for the neighborhood where Toledo lived, George Cardenas, asked what he was doing in the alley at 2:30am in the morning. In the days before the release of the body camera video, Lightfoot ordered the closure of the downtown highway and pleaded for calm.
One’s first inclination is to refute these statements on the merits—what does it matter if he was in the alley? What does it matter if he was in a gang? In truth though it is better to view these statements as the instinctive and almost involuntary response on the part of the state. The apparatus of policing cannot but lie, it cannot but impugn the character of the dead, it cannot but fabricate firearms and gangs. It is incapable of remorse as we understand it. The actual outcome is always the optimal outcome, even and especially if that outcome is murder, regardless of whether the murderer discharged a gun she thought was a Taser or chose for nine minutes to kneel on someone’s neck.
When I was a student journalist in Chicago I worked under the tutelage of a group of reporters and advocates who worked to secure the release of the Laquan McDonald shooting video. That video, which showed an officer shooting a teenage boy sixteen consecutive times, provided a constant refrain for those of us in the city who were working against the nefarious aims of the police department. Sixteen shots and a cover up, because the administration of Rahm Emanuel hid the video for more than a year, because it took the endless labor of a few advocates to bring the evidence to light.
Sixteen shots and a cover up, but it’s no better when there’s only one shot, it’s no better when the video comes out two weeks later instead of a year after the fact. It’s the same whether the officer has a history of disciplinary violations, as did the one who killed McDonald, or has no violations and is a recipient of the Superintendent’s Award of Valor, as is the one who killed Toledo. The superficially different responses of the state exist on a tight continuum—six of one, half a dozen of the other.
It’s hard to believe that after years of upheaval in Chicago over police violence, after a Justice Department investigation and who knows how many reform proposals, after a year of global resistance to police violence, almost nothing has changed. The policing oversight agency was dissolved, another one created. A consent decree was established and then revoked. The old revolting mayor was replaced with a new mayor who came from the old oversight agency, a tool of the same order. No, even that earlier statement was too kind—it’s not that almost nothing has changed. Nothing has changed. How?
The obvious answer is that nothing has changed because nothing can change. The issue is not with policing as it has been conducted but with policing as a medium of state action, or maybe with the state as an entity full stop. I am white and non-threatening, and I recognize that I face no direct physical danger from the police—although it sure did not feel that way last June in New York City. At the same time, though, I believe that reporting in Chicago gave me enough personal experience to understand in my stomach that the police cannot be reformed.
I recall that one morning after attending a history class on the origin of policing in eighteenth-century London, having discussed the state’s early attempts to defer theft on the city docks, I went out to a reporting assignment in South Shore. I stopped in at a barbershop and talked to the barber, a man named Snoop. A thirty-minute walk through the neighborhood was enough to show the horror of policing in all its forms—the squad cars whirling like vultures, the beat cops muscling around panhandlers, the sentries standing with their hands on their pistols. A few years later, Snoop was murdered by the police.
The truth is that policing cannot be reformed, that every police department and every prosecutor and every court all participate in the same apparatus of violence, but nevertheless it is also true that the Chicago Police Department is one of the most violent and irredeemable institutions that exists on this planet. It is the tip of the spear of state violence, the protruding ice that reveals the ship-sinking iceberg beneath the water. In its specific and unparalleled evil it demonstrates a universal truth.
The city of Chicago exists in the shadow of a unique and lethal violence, a violence that has many sides—the fast violence of a gun, the slow violence of a restrictive covenant, and so on. The corollary of this statement, though, is that the people who live under that unique power have devised unique forms of life to cope with it, to resist it, to refuse its demands whenever and wherever possible.
Foucault wrote, “Where there is power, there is resistance…there is a plurality of resistances, each of them a special case: resistances that are possible, necessary, improbable; others that are spontaneous, savage, solitary, concerted, rampant, or violent.”
I have witnessed forms of charity and solidarity in Chicago that I have never seen anywhere else—free libraries, spontaneous food pantries, all-night vigils, illegal apartments, renegade lawyers, earth-shaking leaders of militant unions. In some sense or another all these forms of what we now call “mutual aid” were acts of resistance, not in a metaphorical sense but in the sense that they existed to counter to the austere and violent aims of the state.
Of course none of it was enough to do more than slow down the spear on its journey through the body. There is another section of that Foucault quote, one I excised before: “this resistance is never in a position of exteriority in relation to power.” Years of organized struggle, tens of millions of people in the streets, and we are back where we started, with a murder that conscience cannot comprehend, a murder that cannot be justified except by the lashing organism that cannot help but murder. It seems naive to envision that this organism will ever die even a partial death, and yet how could it not die?
Seen from this perspective, police abolition is not a policy proposal but an ideal that provides a living context to every other fight against state-imposed suffering. In other words the notion of freedom from the police is the language in which political struggle finds meaning.