Who Killed Adam Toledo?

How did a 13-year-old boy end up in an alley with a gun at 2:30 on a Monday morning?

Rafael A. Mangual April 19, 2021 @ City Journal.  Published with permission.  I recommend subscribing, it's free. 

On March 29, just after 2:30 AM, Chicago’s ShotSpotter alert system detected eight or nine gunshots in the West Side, largely Latino, neighborhood of Little Village, where gangs like the Latin Kings and Two Six have made gunplay a regular part of life. Chicago police officer Eric Stillman and his partner sped toward the gunshots once they received the ShotSpotter alert, doubtless hoping to nab the perpetrators and spare the community additional carnage. When they arrived on the scene, almost immediately after those shots were fired, they happened upon two individuals. One of them—who we now know to be 13-year-old Adam Toledo—took off on foot and, at one point, pulled a gun with his right hand. Stillman gave chase, and the world saw what happened next—at least the part highlighted (and, in one case, deceptively edited) by media outlets, many of which elided the actual events of Toledo’s shooting.

The immediate cause of Toledo’s death was the bullet fired by Officer Stillman. But it’s worth examining how a 13-year-old boy ended up in a full sprint through a dark alley at 2:30 AM with a gun in his hand and a police officer on his tail.

Start a few minutes before the shooting. Though it hasn’t gotten much attention, a video compilation that the Chicago Police Department released includes footage that seems to show Toledo walking with a young man before one (or both) fired the eight or nine shots at a passing vehicle near the alley where the police encountered Toledo. Exactly who pulled the trigger remains unclear (the footage is grainy), though CNN reported last Friday, citing prosecutors, that both Toledo’s hand, and the gloves of the man he was with, tested positive for gunshot residue. According to police, that man is a 21-year-old named Ruben Roman, who was arrested at the scene for allegedly obstructing Officer Stillman as he gave chase.

All indications are that Roman was exactly the kind of negative influence to Toledo that loving parents stuck in high-crime neighborhoods stay up nights worrying about. Chicago’s publicly available arrest database shows that Roman has been collared at least six times by the Chicago Police Department (CPD) since 2017. He has at least one felony conviction, for a gun offense, for which he was apparently sentenced to probation. According to a Chicago police officer (who spoke with me on the condition of anonymity), Roman is listed as a member of the Latin Kings street gang in the CPD’s database.

Local thugs often lure impressionable children into the gangster lifestyle they glorify by promising protection and brotherhood, and Roman seems an illustrative example. But he didn’t protect or care about his young charge the morning of March 29. In fact, as shown on the body-worn camera footage of the officers arriving after Toledo was shot, Roman didn’t shed a tear after Toledo was shot but pretended not to know the 13-year-old at all. Roman’s decision not to provide police with information about Toledo’s identity meant that the boy would be listed as a “John Doe” in the CPD’s paperwork, and his family couldn’t be notified. Toledo’s body remained unidentified in the morgue for two days before the police were able to contact his mother.

This is a common story, sadly. People like Roman corrupt kids like Toledo, and put them on paths that lead to untimely deaths, incarcerations, and perpetrations of evil. Street gangs recruit child soldiers into their turf wars, which turn playgrounds into battlefields and leave parents holding the bodies of the children caught in the crossfire; and they should be shamed for it.

Some reformers, in Illinois and elsewhere, have been pushing proposals to raise the age of criminal responsibility to 18 or 21, which could make this phenomenon worse. A 2015 report in the Chicago Tribune quoted the now-former state’s attorney of Kane County, Illinois, who expressed concern that such a reform would heighten the incentive for “more adult members” to “push the responsibility to carry out shootings onto juveniles.”

Yet while future changes to criminal justice policy might worsen the gang problem in neighborhoods like Little Village, the current criminal justice system also plays a role in Chicago’s toxic gang culture. How does a system that continuously releases known gang members and other repeat offenders back into their communities—despite long arrest records and serious criminal convictions involving firearms and violent crimes—improve the prospects of children in Chicago’s South and West Side neighborhoods, such as Austin, West Garfield Park, Englewood, and Humboldt Park? It doesn’t.

In the end, Adam Toledo’s tragic death was caused not just by a police officer’s bullet but by the forces that introduced him to gang life—influences that won’t go away unless steps are taken to target the incorrigible violent offenders who reduce the chances of kids like Toledo living long and productive lives. That mission will require a groundswell of support to carry out.

Rafael A. Mangual is a senior fellow and deputy director of legal policy at the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research, and a contributing editor of City Journal.

 

“We Will Burn and Loot and Destroy”: The Weather Underground and Its Legacy

Jay Nordlinger

 

In 1972, James Merrill wrote a poem called “18 West 11th Street.” That is an address in Greenwich Village, New York City. At the beginning of his poem, Merrill refers to “the Aquarians in the basement.” Later, he speaks of the house at large as “dear premises,” which have been “vainly exploded” and are “vainly dwelt upon.” Let’s dwell upon them.

Merrill was born in that house—a townhouse—in 1926. His father, Charles, was the founder of Merrill Lynch, the investment bank. The family moved from the house when the future poet was five. The house passed through several hands, including those of James P. Wilkerson, an advertising executive.

In the early months of 1970, Wilkerson was on vacation in the Caribbean. His daughter Cathy, age 25 and a political radical, asked whether she could use the house in his absence. She needed a place to convalesce from the flu, she said. Her father agreed. The house at 18 West 11th Street became a base for the Weather Underground Organization.

Cathy Wilkerson moved in with several of her comrades. They were planning to commit a mass murder at Fort Dix, in New Jersey. They were also planning to blow up the administration building at Columbia University. At Fort Dix, there was to be an NCO dance—a big party, where non-commissioned officers would dance with their dates. The “Aquarians in the basement” were preparing a nail bomb.

Clumsy, they blew up themselves and the house. This was shortly before noon on March 6; the dance was scheduled for that night.

Two of the bombmakers, Terry Robbins and Diana Oughton, died in the basement. A third, Ted Gold, died when the façade collapsed on him. He had run an errand and was returning to the house. Two others—Cathy Wilkerson and Kathy Boudin—were on upper floors. They managed to escape the house, although, of course, they were badly shaken. One was naked, one partially so. Evidently, the blast had blown their clothes off.

A neighbor helped the young women. She was Susan Wager, an ex-wife of Henry Fonda. She offered the women a shower and gave them fresh clothes to wear. Then the women went to a different home: the home of Kathy Boudin’s parents, where they spent the night. Kathy’s father, Leonard Boudin, was a prominent left-wing lawyer.

The next day, the women—disappeared. They would be on the lam for ten years, and on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted List..................To Read More...

My Take - One thing becomes abundantly clear: Those who were in college at this time became mentally, emotionally and philosophically corrupted with leftist insanity, and then became the nation's leaders.  This piece is a clear demonstration of how far we've descended into the leftist sewer of insanity, inhumanity, tyranny and ultimately, dystopia.  

 

The author ends saying: 

 

Yes, it can all break down, quickly. Constant vigilance is wearying, perhaps. But there is no better alternative.

Hollywood Fights to Free Muggers and Killers - and Lock Up Those Who Steal Their Movie

Daniel Greenfield December 30, 2020 @ Sultan Knish Blog

 

When George Gascon ran for DA of Los Angeles County on a platform of protecting criminals from cops, Hollywood money put him over the top. Once Gascon got into office, he began dismantling protection for victims of violent crimes. Even for the littlest victims.

The beneficiaries of his pro-crime policies funded by Hollywood included a monster who beat a 6-month-old baby girl so badly that her skull shattered leaving her with brain damage.

The little girl is now blind and can only eat through a feeding tube.

This is the pro-crime program that major Hollywood donors like Netflix CEO Reed Hastings, Steven Spielberg, Warner Bros' first black TV head Channing Dungey, and other industry figures, had paid for. Hollywood has been a major source of cash for pro-crime politicians and legislation that helps criminals at the expense of their victims. Except in one particular area.

You can crush a baby’s skull, mug an 80-year-old woman, or break into the home of any ordinary person, but what you can’t do is infringe on Hollywood’s copyrights. And that’s why the same industry that champions muggers, rapists, and killers also embedded felony streaming into the omnibus bill that threatens offenders with anywhere from 7 to 10 years in prison for the "unauthorized" rebroadcasting of movies, shows, and sports over the internet.

This comes from the same industry that also funded the ‘legalization’ of shoplifting.

Proposition 47 essentially ended prosecution for thefts of under $950, replacing them with meaningless citations. The proposition, backed by Gascon, turned stealing anything under $950 into a misdemeanor instead of a felony. It was backed by major entertainment industry figures including Netflix CEO Reed Hastings, Brad Pitt, Judd Apatow, Edward Norton, and a roster of other stars, two of whom have since been accused of sexual abuse, under ‘Artists for 47’.

But while fighting to make stealing hundreds of dollars worth of products from stores a misdemeanor, the entertainment industry was also fighting to make streaming a felony.

Rob a grocery store and you get a citation, but streaming an NFL game is a felony.

“All creative people want the same thing – to share their vision with the world and make a living doing it,” Creative Future argues. That’s a laudable thing, but why shouldn’t a store owner in Oakland expect to be able to earn a living without being robbed every day? Or are property rights reserved only for “creative” people working in an industry where plagiarism is the norm?

The industry trade group lobbying for felony streaming boasts a coalition that includes AMC, the Chinese Communist owned theater chain, CBS, Disney, the DGA, HBO, Lionsgate, Miramax, MGM, Paramount, Sony, Warner, and the cream of the same industry lobbying to free criminals.

One Creative Future letter barked that it “is long overdue to ensure that large-scale perpetrators of all forms of digital piracy may face meaningful criminal penalties”. The letter was signed by assorted industry trade groups including the DGA, of which Spielberg is a member, and SAG, of which most of the 'Artists for 47' and a number of Gascon’s backers are members.

There are to be “meaningful criminal penalties” for piracy, not for crushing a baby’s skull.

The DGA’s position is understandable considering its members include Victor Salva, a director convicted of sexually abusing the 12-year-old star of his first movie, but who went on to make horror movies produced by DGA Lifetime Achievement Award recipient Francis Ford Coppola before going on to make a Disney movie with the child he had abused protesting outside.

The DGA ran an interview with Roman Polanski, who had drugged and raped a 13-year-old girl, sensitively asking the auteur, "could you conceive of ever working in America again or would the media circus just be too much to deal with?"

The entertainment industry prioritizes the money of its members, not the bodies of children.

Just ask DGA members John Landis and Steven Spielberg about the deaths of 7-year-old Myca Le and 6-year-old Renee Chen on the set of The Twilight Zone Movie while trying to portray the evils of America ‘bombing’ innocent Vietnamese children by fighting Communism.

The felony streaming bill is pushed by Senator Patrick Leahy, whose ties to the industry and Warners are so blatant that he had cameo roles in multiple Batman movies, and who favors all kinds of decriminalization measures for actual crimes like drugs and prostitution by minors.

But the industry likes legal drugs and minor prostitution, and hates illegal streaming.

Leahy’s press release for going easy on drug traffickers claims “we cannot afford to waste more and more taxpayer dollars on over-incarceration.”

Unless it’s incarcerating the enemies of the entertainment industry that holds his leash.

Hollywood, its trade groups, and the legislators they funded insist that their 7 to 10 years in prison for video streaming is all about "large-scale piracy" and won't affect ordinary people. There's obviously no reason to be skeptical that the government will abuse that power. Government never does. Just like Hollywood and the politicians they bought never lie.

And the same industry which tried to ban the VCR while claiming that "the VCR is to the American film producer and the American public as the Boston strangler is to the woman home alone" can be trusted not to overreach its power in order to maintain its grip on Americans.

"86.8 percent of all these owners erase or skip commercials," the Motion Picture Association boss had once ranted at a congressional hearing.

"The average number of cassettes per household… 28 cassettes. Now, if… all you are doing is you are away from home and you are taping something... you don't need 28 cassettes. You need one cassette or at the most two. Why do you have 28?"

The same industry that treated the number of VCR tapes Americans had in their homes as evidence of a criminal conspiracy can be trusted to write reasonable and sensible laws.

“We have the best congress money can buy,” Will Rogers supposedly once joked. Complaining that industry trade group lobbyists and lawyers write laws is like pointing out that water is wet.

This is the ordinary everyday corruption of our political system that resulted not only in felony streaming, but the CASE Act, a system to take copyright litigation out of courts and to arbitrators, allowing the industry to hit ordinary people with $30,000 judgements, along with assorted tax breaks that were rolled into the omnibus spending bill. And then there's a five year tax break for Hollywood that allows producers to expense $15 million in production costs.

But when the same industry that criminalizes those who infringe its intellectual property rights also decriminalizes robbery, rape, and assault against ordinary people, it’s too much.

“At the age of 6 months, this little child was bludgeoned over the head by a babysitter. She suffered traumatic brain injury; she had a skull fracture, multiple hematoma in her head, she’s now permanently blind and now the District Attorney wants to drop the great bodily injury allegation which would mean this defendant would be eligible for probation, she would serve no time for a heinous, heinous crime,” Sam Dordulian, the pro bono lawyer for the family, warned.

This is the outcome that Steven Spielberg, Netflix, Warner’s TV boss, and other industry power brokers paid for when they bought the DA election for the Black Lives Matter candidate.

Now Warner Bros, Spielberg, through the DGA, and the rest of the industry want to send people to prison for 10 years for streaming videos while crushing a baby’s skull gets you probation.

“The DA of Los Angeles County has stated that all allegations involving the Great Bodily Injury of a child (ex: burns, fractures, blindness, or broken bones) shall be dismissed," an LA Deputy DA warned.

Break a child’s bones, blind or burn him, and get off with a slap on the wrist. But don’t you dare stream a movie. Hollywood has standards. Releasing criminals is a good thing. Muggers, rapists, and child abusers should be on the loose. But lock up everyone who prevents Hollywood from making as much money as it can from Frozen 3 or Big Bang Theory reruns.

It’s not that Hollywood opposes criminal justice on principle. Illegally stream its movies and it will fight to throw you into the same cell vacated by the rapists and murderers it fought to set free.

Prisons, it believes work. So does the criminal justice system. They must, otherwise Hollywood wouldn’t be pushing to send people who stream its products to prison for a decade.

It just doesn’t believe that thugs who break into your home should be sent to prison.

Much as it believes that guns work, when carried by its armed bodyguards, but doesn’t believe that you should be able to own a gun to protect your home from the criminals they set loose.

And that is the real crime.

The Left’s oligarchy is building a two-tier society under the guise of fighting for social justice. Crimes that violate its property and political propriety will be punished more ruthlessly than ever, but the crimes that destroy the lives of the working class and the middle class will be legalized.

In Hollywood’s America, there will be chaos in the streets, but its corporations will wield supreme power. No shopkeeper can be safe, but every studio will be covered. There will be police, but you won’t call them when you’re mugged: they will come when you make a meme.

There will be one law for the ruling class and another for the little people. And these laws will be administered by the handpicked appointees of the ruling class who will stop prosecuting violent crimes, but aggressively prosecute infringements on the financial interests of the ruling class.

That’s not some future dystopia. It’s LA.

And it’s coming to all of America.

Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is an investigative journalist and writer focusing on the radical Left and Islamic terrorism.

 

Tags: Hollywood, Pro-Crime, recent

 

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About Daniel Greenfield
Daniel Greenfield is a journalist investigating Islamic terrorism and the Left. He is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center

Police Defunding, Like Communism, Can’t Fail

Daniel Greenfield December 20, 2020 @ Sultan Knish Blog

 “I guess you can use a snappy slogan, like ‘defund the police.’ But, you know, you lost a big audience the minute you say it," Barack Obama complained.

Obama was pretending that there had never been a serious push to get rid of the police, and after spending eight years mainstreaming black nationalism and the pro-crime politics of police defunding was trying to pretend it was just an edgy slogan calling for “criminal justice reform”.

That would have come as news to Minneapolis residents, the birthplace of the third wave of Black Lives Matter riots, where the city council had embraced police defunding, before backing off as the city tottered under an unprecedented wave of murders, assaults, and robberies.

"It’s not a slogan but a policy demand," Rep. Ilhan Omar, the antisemitic Islamist adultress accused of marrying her brother, snapped.

“With all due respect, Mr. President—let’s talk about losing people," Rep. Cori Bush, the latest member of the socialist squad, ranted. "It’s not a slogan. It’s a mandate for keeping our people alive. Defund the police.”

The year isn’t over yet, but murders in Minneapolis are up 62%, twice as many people, over 500, have been shot this year as in 2019, and the city is on track for 5,000 violent crimes.

A women’s shelter opposed police defunding proposals and described women sleeping with their feet to the windows out of fear that a stray bullet will strike them in the head.

“I have relived that night many times, hearing the sounds of the bullets hitting my radiator and drywall spraying everywhere,” a South Minneapolis resident told councilmembers at a hearing, and called police defunding a, “sociology experiment that obviously doesn’t work.”

But you can say the same thing about virtually any left policy from soda taxes to Communism.

Councilman Jeremiah Bey Ellison, the son of Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison, argued that police defunding wasn’t working because it had never been tried. His father had previously suggested that police shouldn’t respond to rape calls. But police defunding has indeed never been properly tried because the Minneapolis City Council failed to formulate any kind of plan.

Ellison blamed the huge surge in crime, including a 537% increase in carjackings in the birthplace of police defunding, on “conventional wisdom” and the “century-long failure to create a public safety system that is not police-only.” The public safety system isn’t ‘police only’. It already includes a huge component of social services. The reason we have the police is that the billions that are already thrown at social services rarely stop crime. Billions more won’t fix it.

The obvious problem with police defunding or abolition is that its proponents have no plan for dealing with crime beyond telling victims to suck it up and offering the perps social services.

Real police defunding calls for getting rid of the police, prosecutors, and prisons, before replacing them with therapy sessions for criminals under the name ‘restorative justice’. When the godmother of police defunding tried it out with a Black Lives Matter rapist, he kept on raping.

When CNN’s Wolf Blitzer asked Minneapolis City Council President Lisa Bender who would respond to an active shooter, after repeatedly talking about replacing the police, she and her colleague responded that it would be the job of the police. There’s still no better answer.

Police defunders insist that crime is caused by an unjust society and will go away when enough money is invested into the welfare state, affirmative action, and critical race theory training.

Minneapolis Democrats can’t answer who would deal with an active shooter because their ideology tells them that active shooters won’t exist once they finish reforming society. This is a familiar enough argument from leftists explaining how Communism was going to function. Those same theoreticians would then go on to explain that real Communism had never been tried.

The Soviet Union, Castro’s Cuba, and Maoist China, were never true Communism.

The advocates of police defunding will go on holding up their imaginary utopia as an ideal while claiming that like Communism, it never failed because it had never been properly implemented.

Even if some city is insane enough to actually abolish the police and prisons, and put the entire budget into social services, it still won’t be enough because the entire system will still be centering whiteness. Get rid of all the white people and there’ll be internalized whiteness.

And defunding advocates, like Omar, Tlaib, and Bush, will go on arguing that it was never tried.

But no city will go that far. There are police union contracts and chambers of commerce to contend with. Instead police budgets will be cut leading to limited enforcement and crime spikes. That’s already underway in Minneapolis and in cities across the country. The police will keep their heads down until, as in Minneapolis, public outrage leads politicians to ask for their help.

America has been living on this policy seesaw for seventy years, as cities switched between permissive pro-crime policies to crackdowns on criminals without learning from the past. Once crime is under control, the pro-crime arguments about brutal police and the cost of mass incarceration start sounding reasonable to people who forgot what living with crime is like.

But the idea that crime springs from an unjust society, instead of a tainted mind, will never die.

Police defunding shows why a fundamentally stupid idea that is at the root of our social problems won’t go away because, like most utopian nonsense, it can’t be disproven. Or at least it can’t be disproven to the satisfaction of the sorts of lefties who look at millions dead in Russia and China, or a double-digit rise in homicide rates in major American cities, and shrug.

It hasn’t really been tried. Not properly. This time it’ll work.

Criminal justice is one of those areas where there’s a fundamental philosophical difference about the nature of humanity that translates into completely incompatible policies. The fundamental question here is the familiar one of free will. Are criminals free agents or victims?

Asking Minneapolis Democrats who supported police defunding what they plan to do about an active shooter is a meaningless question within their ideological frame of reference because it presupposes that the active shooter has free will and can be stopped by direct intervention. In their holistic view of society, violence causes violence, and the active shooter only exists because we have armed police, fight wars, and let little boys play ‘cops and robbers’.

But that’s much the same answer you get when asking a leftist why there’s alcoholism, wars, or hurricanes. The messianic response in all cases is that these are problems caused by society that will go away when lefties are given enough power to fundamentally transform society.

You don’t give political power to people who think that way or ask them to solve any problems.

Abolishing the police, like abolishing rent, student loans, free speech, religion, and private property, all ideas currently being advocated by the American Left, is just another way of saying that all of our problems are caused by society and will go away when our society goes away.

Police defunding, like Soviet collective farms or socialized medicine, is only the latest lunatic leftist proposal to run aground on the shores of reality while being defended as untested.

The police can never be defunded. They must exist, if only to arrest people who erase Black Lives Matter graffiti or fill in ponds on their own property, and their existence keeps police defunding alive as an enlightened ideal that has never been truly implemented. Like abolishing private property, its absurd impossibility makes it compelling, and keeps the nightmare alive.

Every now and then another attempt will be made to defund the police, leading to hundreds and thousands of deaths, and more assaults, robberies, and rapes than even the FBI can count. Like the Soviet Union or the Minneapolis City Council, the whole thing will fall apart on its own, but its memory will linger as an inspiration to the next bunch of radicals who will try it again.

And the bodies of the people sacrificed to that experiment will linger, forgotten, in cemeteries.

Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is an investigative journalist and writer focusing on the radical Left and Islamic terrorism.

Tags: Black Lives Matter, Pro-Crime, recent 

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About Daniel Greenfield
Daniel Greenfield is a journalist investigating Islamic terrorism and the Left. He is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center