Column: Adam Toledo. Daunte Wright. George Floyd. Over and over, after a police killing, a grieving family is left to plead for peace
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After Adam Toledo, a 13-year-old Chicago boy, was shot to death by a Chicago police officer in late March, his mother made a plea for peace.
“No one has anything to gain by inciting violence,” Elizabeth Toledo said in a statement issued on behalf of the family. “Adam was a sweet and loving boy. He would not want anyone else to be injured or die in his name.”
For days, as information on Adam’s shooting — in the middle of the night in the city’s predominantly Latino Little Village — has filtered out, city officials have been preparing for protests that might turn violent. The Toledo family’s plea was made in the hope that calm would prevail.
How much difference that plea might make remains to be seen.
What’s certain is that, over and over, the families of people harmed by police are summoned to be peacekeepers despite the violence inflicted on someone they love.
It happened again a few days ago in the Minneapolis suburb of Brooklyn Center after a police officer shot Daunte Wright, a 20-year-old Black man, during a traffic stop. Protests, some violent, have followed, and Wright’s death, caused by a gunshot to the chest, has been ruled a homicide.
Once again, a mother has begged for peace.
“All the violence, if it keeps going, it’s only going to be about the violence,” Katie Wright said. “We need it to be about why my son got shot for no reason. We need to make sure it’s about him and not about smashing police cars, because that’s not going to bring my son back.”
Last summer, the peacekeeping job fell to Jacob Blake’s mother, after a police officer shot her son, a 29-year-old Black man, seven times in the back. He was left partially paralyzed.
“We really just need prayers,” Blake’s mother, Julia Jackson, said after violence, along with peaceful protests, erupted in Kenosha. “As I was riding through here, the city, I noticed a lot of damage. It doesn’t reflect my son or my family. If Jacob knew what was going on as far as that goes — the violence and the destruction — he would be very unpleased.” What the city needed, she said, was “healing.”
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The job of pleading for peace doesn’t fall only to mothers. George Floyd’s brother Terrence asked for peace last spring after a Minneapolis police officer held his knee on Floyd’s neck for nine minutes and Floyd died. Protests, some of them violent, rocked the country. The officer, Derek Chauvin, is currently on trial for murder.
A few days after his brother died, Terrence Floyd visited the intersection where George Floyd was pinned to his death. He wept. He prayed. And he pleaded.
“First of all, first of all,” he told the crowd, “if I’m not over here wilin’ out, if I’m not over here blowing up stuff, if I’m not over here messing up my community — then what are y’all doing? Nothing, because that’s not going to bring my brother back at all. … So let’s do this another way. Let’s stop thinking that our voice don’t matter and vote … because it’s a lot of us and we still going to do this peacefully.”
He led the crowd in a chant: “Peace on the left and justice on the right.”
Each of these cases is different and yet they’re all exhaustingly similar, exhaustingly familiar. In each one, an officer of the law has inflicted violence on a Black or brown boy or man, and none of these cases should have happened that way.
On Tuesday, former President Barack Obama and former first lady Michelle Obama issued a statement that pithily addressed Daunte Wright’s shooting and the larger problem: “The fact that this could happen even as the city of Minneapolis is going through the trial of Derek Chauvin and reliving the heart-wrenching murder of George Floyd indicates not just how important it is to conduct a full and transparent investigation, but also just how badly we need to reimagine policing and public safety in this country.”
The police have a hard job. It’s made harder when they inflict unnecessary, unjust harm. It’s made easier by families who even in the midst of grief call for peace.
Let’s take a moment to appreciate the family members like Elizabeth Toledo, Katie Wright, Julia Jackson and Terrence Floyd who are wise and generous enough to make the effort to try to keep us all safe.
