CHICAGO – Hundreds of people marched through the Logan Square neighborhood of Chicago on Friday night, demanding that the city’s police department be refurbished after the fatal shooting of 13-year-old Adam Toledo by a police officer in March.
A large crowd held up the signs with the caption “Justicia Para Adam” and “We are Adam, defold the police” when speakers denounced the Chicago Police Department and Mayor Lori Lightfoot.
Adam was shot dead in the early hours of March 29 by a police officer, Eric E. Stillman, 34. In the video of the shooting, which was released on Thursday by an independent city agency investigating police behavior, Adam is being chased. an alley by a white police officer who orders him to stop and show his hands. An analysis of the video, which slows down the events that took place over the course of a second, shows how the boy apparently threw a gun nearby and raised his hands in the air, just before the officer stabbed him in the chest. shoot.
Jasmin Cardenas, who attended the march with her two young children, cried as she held a sign supporting Adam and his family. She lives in Little Village, the predominantly Latino neighborhood where Adam was murdered, and runs an after-school art program that once worked with children at Gary Elementary, where Adam was a student.
The area does not have enough services for children and teenagers, it needs nurses in schools and more arts programs to keep young people busy.
“I’m just shocked at how many of us made mistakes and we’re still here,” she said. Cardenas said. “He did all the right things. He raises his hands, and he still shoots. ‘
With renewed national attention to police conduct amid the Derek Chauvin trial in Minneapolis, there were also protests outside Chicago on Friday night.
In the suburb of Brooklyn’s downtown Minneapolis, Minn., Protests continued for a sixth consecutive night in front of the city’s police department following an officer’s fatal shooting at a 20-year-old motorist, Daunte Wright.
Protesters occasionally threw bottles of water and pushed against a fence in front of the police department. Police found a burst of pepper spray, rubber bullets and grenades fired which struck a severe blow in the crowd, injuring several people and the umbrella that a protester used to put pepper on fire, stabbed briefly on fire. There was no curfew on Friday, but police declared the meeting illegal before running on the crowd just after 10 p.m.
In Chicago, speakers at the start of the protest addressed a crowd in a large neighborhood park and demanded that the police defuse and that measures such as rent control should be put in place. When mentioning me. Lightfoot through one of the speakers, the crowd cheered loudly.
“Our goal is not to make people forget and stay active,” said Maximo Rodriguez, who has been involved in social affairs since 1985, when he was a student at the University of Illinois at Chicago. “The problem is not us, it’s the police. Whenever they are there, there is a chance of violence. ”
Evelene Certa, 13, of suburban Berwyn, has been protesting with her family all her life, she said. “This one, this is a kid my age,” she said before stopping herself. ‘It could have happened to me. It really changes my point of view. ”
Nicholas Bogel-Burroughs and Dan Simmons reported.