The Chicago Police Department’s incident report of an officer-involved shooting where 13-year-old Adam Toledo was killed. However, the report lists the officer who shot the boy as the “victim.”
Toledo was shot and killed during a foot pursuit by a Chicago police officer on March 29. He was shot with a single bullet to the chest.
Body camera footage shows Toledo running away from officer Eric Stillman. He then stops and turns with his hands up before being shot. But Stillman was listed as a “victim” on the incident report. It’s unclear if this is standard procedure.
The Civilian Office of Police Accountability (COPA), a police watchdog agency in Chicago, on Thursday afternoon, released the case report for the incident, as well as graphic footage of the fatal shooting.
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The report identifies officer Eric Stillman, 34, listing the officer as a victim in an aggravated assault of a law enforcement officer. According to a tactical response report released by COPA, Toledo was armed with a semi-automatic pistol, which was “displayed, not used” during the incident.
Listing the officer as the victim in the incident “is a long-used and hackneyed police trope” to recast the “focus of culpability and blame onto the actual victim of the police deadly force incident, i.e. the person who the police killed,” a law enforcement expert told Business Insider.
“Thus the victim, in this case the unarmed dead child who is shot and killed by police becomes the ‘perpetrator’ and the police officer shooter, the killer, assumes the posture and pose of ‘victim,'” he told Insider. “It’s an old cop trick meant to muddy the murky waters, and is often used in the aftermath of what we cops call a ‘bad shoot.'”
Read the report below:
