[With shootings in the city on the rise, trust in the police has
nearly bottomed out.] [[link removed]]

THE KILLING OF ADAM TOLEDO AND THE COLLIDING CYCLES OF VIOLENCE IN
CHICAGO  
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Alex Kotlowitz, Photos by Nyia Sissac
April 24, 2021
The New Yorker
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_ With shootings in the city on the rise, trust in the police has
nearly bottomed out. _

Candles and flowers placed in remembrance of the thirteen-year-old
Adam Toledo, who was killed by police in March., Nyia Sissac for The
New Yorker

 

Eddie Bocanegra and I met by Farragut high school in Chicago’s
Little Village, a predominantly Latino neighborhood on the city’s
West Side. This was, as Bocanegra said, his “old stomping ground.”
He pointed out a crack along a wall and laughed. “It’s like
archeology,” he told me, as he peeled back a sliver of paint to
reveal layers upon layers of coats underneath, each one covering up
graffiti, some of which Bocanegra contributed as a kid. We came here
to talk about a recent incident. On March 29th, in an alley a couple
hundred feet from the school, a police officer shot and killed Adam
Toledo, who was just thirteen years old. The city released body-cam
footage of the incident last week, which has led to large protests.
Mayor Lori Lightfoot has called for a reconsideration of the Chicago
Police Department’s policy on foot pursuits. An alderman declared
that Toledo had been “executed.”

Bocanegra, who runs one of the most innovative violence-prevention
programs in the country, felt compelled to watch the video of
Toledo’s death. At two-thirty in the morning, the police responded
to eight gunshots, which were captured on a new electronic
surveillance system that detects gunfire in certain parts of the city.
When the police got to the corner, they confronted Toledo, who
allegedly was handed a handgun by a twenty-one-year-old man who had
just fired it. Toledo ran down an alley, and an officer eventually
caught up with him, by a damaged wood fence. The officer yelled,
“Show me your hands!” On the video, Toledo, with his back to the
officer, appears to toss the gun to the ground and quickly turn
around, his hands in the air. He is wearing a white baseball cap and a
Nike sweatshirt that reads “_just do it_.” The officer fired once
and hit Toledo in the chest. He died at the scene. Bocanegra’s wife,
Kathryn, an assistant professor at the Jane Addams College of Social
Work, urged Bocanegra not to watch it, but he did—not once but
twice. He told me that he needed to, to make up his own mind about
what had happened. For three nights, he couldn’t sleep. It brought
back memories of friends he’d seen shot in that same neighborhood.
“It never goes away,” he said.

I wrote about Bocanegra in my book “An American Summer
[[link removed]],”
and consider him a close friend. We first met a decade ago, when he
worked as a violence interrupter for an organization called CeaseFire.
In that job, he roamed his neighborhood mediating disputes before they
became violent. The work got to him, though, in part because people
often assumed that he was still in the streets. In fact, Bocanegra
self-consciously dressed in a manner that challenged people’s
assumptions: dress slacks and sweaters, as if he had walked out of a
J. Crew ad. Like other violence interrupters, Bocanegra had a personal
history. For a long time, it was one of the first things that he’d
tell you about himself—he figured people would find out anyway, and
so he wanted them to hear it from him. He had belonged to a local
street gang. At the age of eighteen, in retaliation for a shooting
that paralyzed an older member, he shot and killed a rival gang
member. Bocanegra served fourteen years in prison. Every year, on the
anniversary of the shooting—July 17th—he fasts and visits with
people who are struggling, often because they’ve lost a loved one to
murder or to prison. His life’s work is aimed at giving back, at
trying to make up for what he did.

Bocanegra, who’s forty-five, now runs _readi_ Chicago, a program
directed at young men who are among the most likely in the city to
shoot someone or get shot. _readi_ identifies them through a
combination of human intelligence and data. It’s a population that
most organizations don’t want to work with. The men are given jobs,
which is nothing new. But they’re also required to participate in
cognitive-behavioral-therapy group sessions designed to give
participants tools to grapple with their trauma. In recent years, the
violence-prevention field—in part, led by Bocanegra’s
efforts—has focussed on recognizing signs of trauma among people
whose lives have been touched by violence: difficulty sleeping,
agitation, trouble concentrating, self-medicating, flashbacks.
“They’re looking for a space to tell their stories,” Bocanegra
said, of the therapy sessions. “Sometimes they won’t stop
talking.” Representatives from a half-dozen cities have
visited _readi_ Chicago, interested in finding ways to replicate the
program. Earlier this month, Bocanegra was invited to attend a
ceremony at the White House, where President Joe Biden
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curb gun violence, including evidence-based community interventions.

According to researchers at the University of Chicago’s Crime Lab,
the University of Michigan, and Cornell University, who are evaluating
Bocanegra’s program, early data indicates that _readi_ is keeping
more than six hundred men safer, compared with a control group that
did not participate in the program. Even so, over the past year, ten
young men who have passed through the program were killed in the
streets. One evening, in October, Bocanegra called me and sounded
troubled. He told me that Marc Nevarez, a young man whom Bocanegra had
mentored as a kid—someone he adored—had been shot in the buttocks,
while running from the police. He was carrying a gun. “But shot from
behind?” Bocanegra asked rhetorically. “We all want public
safety,” he said. “But we want public safety without getting
people killed.” In Nevarez’s shooting, as in that of Toledo, the
police department issued initial statements saying that officers had
faced “an armed encounter.” In Toledo’s case, he was unarmed
when he was shot. In Nevarez’s case, he was fleeing the police.
“Get it right, man,” Bocanegra said. “This is why we have a hard
time trusting the police.”

Even before Toledo’s death, trust in the Chicago Police Department
was near rock bottom. In 2014, a police officer shot and killed the
seventeen-year-old Laquan McDonald, and the city, at first, refused to
release dash-cam video of the incident. When it was finally released,
a year later, it showed McDonald being shot sixteen times as he was
walking away from an officer. In 2017, the U.S. Department of Justice
issued a damning report that concluded that Chicago’s police had
long engaged in a pattern of using excessive force, especially against
minorities. In one two-month period, last summer, the police shot five
people, two of them fatally. Meanwhile, in 2020, the city saw a
fifty-five-per-cent spike in homicide compared with the previous year,
recording seven hundred and eighty murders. (Chicago is not the only
city to see a surge in homicides. In Los Angeles, they increased
thirty-seven per cent from the previous year; in New York, forty-three
per cent; in Louisville, sixty-one per cent; in Phoenix, forty-six per
cent.)

Eddie Bocanegra runs one of the most innovative violence-prevention
programs in the country.

According to researchers at the University of Chicago’s Crime Lab,
the University of Michigan, and Cornell University, who are evaluating
Bocanegra’s program, early data indicates that _readi_ is keeping
more than six hundred men safer, compared with a control group that
did not participate in the program. Even so, over the past year, ten
young men who have passed through the program were killed in the
streets. One evening, in October, Bocanegra called me and sounded
troubled. He told me that Marc Nevarez, a young man whom Bocanegra had
mentored as a kid—someone he adored—had been shot in the buttocks,
while running from the police. He was carrying a gun. “But shot from
behind?” Bocanegra asked rhetorically. “We all want public
safety,” he said. “But we want public safety without getting
people killed.” In Nevarez’s shooting, as in that of Toledo, the
police department issued initial statements saying that officers had
faced “an armed encounter.” In Toledo’s case, he was unarmed
when he was shot. In Nevarez’s case, he was fleeing the police.
“Get it right, man,” Bocanegra said. “This is why we have a hard
time trusting the police.”

Even before Toledo’s death, trust in the Chicago Police Department
was near rock bottom. In 2014, a police officer shot and killed the
seventeen-year-old Laquan McDonald, and the city, at first, refused to
release dash-cam video of the incident. When it was finally released,
a year later, it showed McDonald being shot sixteen times as he was
walking away from an officer. In 2017, the U.S. Department of Justice
issued a damning report that concluded that Chicago’s police had
long engaged in a pattern of using excessive force, especially against
minorities. In one two-month period, last summer, the police shot five
people, two of them fatally. Meanwhile, in 2020, the city saw a
fifty-five-per-cent spike in homicide compared with the previous year,
recording seven hundred and eighty murders. (Chicago is not the only
city to see a surge in homicides. In Los Angeles, they increased
thirty-seven per cent from the previous year; in New York, forty-three
per cent; in Louisville, sixty-one per cent; in Phoenix, forty-six per
cent.)

Bocanegra and I walked across the high school’s craggy soccer turf
to the site where Toledo had been shot. Someone had painted a colorful
mural on the wood fence reading “_we need each other_.” People had
left carnations and daisies along with prayer candles and items that
were reminders of Toledo’s youth: basketballs, a football, a “Star
Wars” game, a stuffed animal. In addition to making the shooting
particularly tragic, Toledo’s young age has made his family a
target. In an interview with CNN, the head of the Fraternal Order of
Police, John Catanzara, described Toledo as a gang member and as a
“poor” and “misguided” kid. A local alderman at a news
conference declared, “This young man had nobody.” On social media,
people pointedly blamed his mother. One freelance columnist, Ray
Hanania, posted, on Facebook, “Toledo’s mother should be charged
with complicity in murder.” Bocanegra can’t help but think of his
own mother, who moved to Texas after Bocanegra went to prison, in part
to protect his younger brothers and also because she felt tarnished by
his crime. Bocanegra knows what people thought—that his mom was
responsible, that she could’ve done more. Speaking of the blame cast
at Toledo’s mother, he told me, “It’s bullshit. This is what
people said about my parents.”

Toledo lived with his mother, his ninety-year-old grandfather, and two
siblings. His father was in his life. Toledo was reportedly in a
special-education class. He may well have been one of the many caught
in the headwinds of the pandemic
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services leaving little support for people experiencing any kind of
distress, especially in communities where resources are already thin.
As we walked down the alley where Toledo had been chased, I sensed
Bocanegra’s agitation. “People ask, ‘What was he doing out at
two-thirty,’ or they talk shit about his mom,” he told me.
“Everyone’s so quick to judge.” Toledo’s family, amid their
mourning, felt compelled to issue a statement: “We . . . want to
correct the hurtful and false mischaracterization of Adam as a lonely
child of the street who had no one to turn to. This is simply not
true. . . . Adam was not alone.”

A mural painted in Toledo’s honor near the site where he was shot.

Six years ago, I wrote
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piece for _The New Yorker_ about the police shooting of Calvin
Cross, who was nineteen and Black. Cross, who had never been in
trouble with the law, had been walking to a bus stop with a friend
when three police officers, dressed head-to-toe in black, jumped out
of a squad car, one of them wielding a military-grade assault rifle.
The police claimed that they had seen Cross fidget with something in
his waistband. Cross ran, and two of the officers later claimed that
Cross had shot at them. The three officers shot forty-five times,
eventually killing Cross at point-blank range, when they found him
lying in the high brush of a vacant lot. The only gun found at the
scene—across the street from Cross’s body—was so old and full of
grime that it was inoperable. Moreover, it had all six bullets in its
chamber. While the city settled with Cross’s family, for two million
dollars, the three officers received certificates of valor. In late
2019, eight years after the shooting, the Civilian Office of Police
Accountability reopened the case and concluded that one of the
officers, Macario Chavez—who fired the full twenty-eight rounds from
his rifle and then shot Cross with his Beretta pistol—had “showed
a reckless disregard for human life.” But the city couldn’t fire
him, because too many years had passed; it had allowed the statute of
limitations to lapse. Instead, officials recommended a thirty-day
suspension.

It’s hard for Bocanegra to disentangle the paucity of police
accountability from the interpersonal violence in Chicago, which is on
pace to exceed last year’s numbers. “Why do people carry guns?”
he asked rhetorically. “They say they don’t feel safe. They
don’t trust the police.” Last year, the Chicago police took 11,343
illegal guns off the street. The solve rate for homicides was less
than fifty per cent; for shootings it was considerably lower. The
police complain that too many people won’t coöperate in their
investigations, but why would they if they don’t believe that the
police will protect them or, for that matter, solve crimes? Marshall
Hatch, Jr., a pastor on the West Side, suggested that there’s a
direct relationship between state-sanctioned violence and
interpersonal violence. “You have to resort to extra-legal justice,
because there is no justice,” he told me, citing the belief of many
in his community.

Bocanegra and I retreated from the evening chill and went for dinner
at a Mexican restaurant tucked behind a small grocery store. Bocanegra
can be hard on himself. At one point, when we were talking about the
shooting of his protégé, Marc Nevarez, he told me, “I’m mad at
the police, but I’m also mad at myself for not doing more. He’d
call me and he just wanted to break bread, to get a meal together, and
I couldn’t find the time because of my own family. I struggle with
that.” His mention of his family reminded Bocanegra of an incident
this past fall. He was driving to his father-in-law’s country home,
a couple hours outside of Chicago. He was pulled over for speeding. It
was nine-thirty at night, and he was driving a minivan loaded with his
wife and their six children. The officer asked for his license and
registration, and then walked back to his squad car. Nearly a half
hour later, the officer returned, handing Bocanegra’s materials back
to him, along with a ticket. “I have to ask you,” the officer
asked, in earshot of the kids. “Are you still in a gang?”
Bocanegra fumed. “He thought I was a nobody,” he told me. “I
just hope, next time, he realizes there’s more to my story.
There’s more to Adam’s story. There’s more to Marc’s story.”

As we finished up, Bocanegra told me that he plans to reach out to
Toledo’s family, but he’s cautious; he doesn’t want to impose.
“This is my back yard,” he explained. “This is where I grew
up.” He told me that he was reserving judgment on the shooting of
Toledo. “I don’t think the cop meant to do that,” he said.
“And I don’t think that kid knew what he got himself into.” He
tried to imagine what might have been going through Toledo’s mind at
the moment that he threw the gun on the ground and turned around with
his hands up. But Bocanegra stopped himself. “At the end of the day,
he was just a kid,” he said. “We failed him.” He sounded
unusually calm, almost resigned. “One reason I’m even-keeled is
because I know it’s going to happen again,” he told me. “I have
to preserve my anger.”

_Alex Kotlowitz
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at Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism, is the
author of four books, including, most recently, “An American Summer
[[link removed]].”_

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