tamir rice essay

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3 T's (Systemic Racism)

Tamir Rice was an innocent 12-year-old child who was killed on November 22, 2014, by a white police officer in Cleveland, Ohio. Two officers responded to a police dispatch call reporting that there was a male pointing a pistol at random people in the park. The 911 caller explicitly stated at the beginning and the middle of the call that the pistol is “probably fake.” Towards the end of the call, he adds that the person pointing the gun “is probably a juvenile.” Tragically, that crucial information was not relayed to the responding officers.

Tamir was by himself, playing in a gazebo when two police officers pulled onto the grass right alongside the gazebo. One officer shot the sixth grader immediately, within three seconds, after arriving on the scene. As the caller had surmised, the gun that this little boy had was indeed just a replica toy gun. The murder of this innocent child happened too quickly. On the video the police car is still in the process of stopping when young Tamir is shot.

To add insult to injury, Tamir’s mother, Samaria Rice, said that she was threatened with arrest because she was yelling at police who refused to let her run to her dying son's aid. She also said that, upon learning he had been shot, his 14-year-old sister also tried to rush to Tamir’s side. That was when police officers tackled Tamir’s sister, handcuffed her and placed her in a squad car with the same police officer who had just shot her little brother.

During the investigation it was revealed that the officer who killed Tamir had been deemed an emotionally unstable recruit and unfit for duty in his previous job as a police officer in a Cleveland suburb. He should not have been a police officer and Tamir should not be dead.

Several months later the prosecution presented evidence to a grand jury, which declined to indict, claiming that Tamir was drawing what appeared to be an actual firearm from his waist as the police arrived. Tamir Rice’s family brought a lawsuit against the city of Cleveland and it was subsequently settled for $6 million.

Michigan Journal of Race & Law

The case of tamir rice: race, self-defense, and the objective reasonableness standard.

By Emmanuela Jean-Etienne Associate Editor, Vol. 21

On a cold November afternoon in Cleveland, twelve-year-old Tamir Rice sat alone at a gazebo outside the Cudell Recreation Center, a place he frequented daily. [1] In his hand was an airsoft pistol and, according to the witness who would later call 9-1-1, he was pointing it at cars and people as they passed by. The orange tip, which indicates that the gun is a toy, had broken off earlier in the day [2] . Two officers, 26-year-old Timothy Loehman and 46-year-old Frank Garmback, responded to a dispatch of a “male black sitting on a swing and pointing a gun at people.” Despite having the information, the responder did not mention that the male was “a juvenile” and that it was “probably a fake gun.” [3]

A video surveillance camera from across the street captured an officer shooting through the open car window even before the car came to a complete stop. Tamir Rice would die the following day. In the months to follow, the nation would learn that the officers who shot Rice did not administer aid, and that his distraught sister was tackled to the ground, handcuffed, and placed in a patrol car when she ran towards her brother to console him in the minutes after the shooting. [4]

The death of the twelve-year-old boy would take center stage amongst discussions of police brutality, body cameras, police training, and a demand to remove the discussion of racism out from under the rug where America has swept it.

In the immediate aftermath of the incident, one question left seemingly unanswered was whether the actions of the two police officers were reasonable. An independent report from the Cuyahoga County prosecutor’s office by a Colorado prosecutor and an FBI agent, released almost a year after Rice’s death, would answer in the affirmative. [5] The legal analysis is rooted in Ohio’s common law definition of self-defense and in case law on the application of the Fourth Amendment in police involved shootings. The report has prompted further outrage and protests from the Black community. Missing from the independent report, however, is social context. There is no discussion of race relations, despite findings of large “systematic deficiencies” in the Cleveland Police Department from a separate investigation by the United States Department of Justice, [6] our knowledge of implicit bias, and a perfect opportunity to discuss how race might have influenced the “reasonableness” of the police officers when they responded to the call.

In Ohio, self-defense is an affirmative defense that requires a defendant to prove three elements by a preponderance of the evidence: “1) the defendant was not at fault in creating the violent situation, 2) the defendant had a bona fide belief that he was in imminent danger of death or great bodily harm and that her only means of escape was the use of force, and 3) that the defendant did not violate any duty to retreat or avoid the danger.” [7] The report concludes the officers fulfilled all the elements under the self-defense definition.

The report provides the application of the elements to the case without assessing the second element within context of larger systemic issues at play.

Case law has expanded our understanding of a bona fide, or reasonable, belief about imminent danger. Tennessee v. Garner established that when an officer has probable cause to believe a suspect poses a threat of serious physical harm, either to police or to others, it is not constitutionally unreasonable to prevent escape by using deadly force. [8] Thus if the suspect threatens the officer with a weapon, deadly force may be used if necessary to prevent escape. The Court then found four years later in Graham v. Connor that “the reasonableness of a particular use of force must be judged from the perspective of a reasonable officer on the scene… [and] must embody allowance for the fact that police officers are often forced to make split-second judgments…about the amount of force that is necessary in a particular situation.” [9]

Overall, reasonableness stems from what the officers believe to be true at the time of the interaction. Police officers are under a lot of stress and taking the time to evaluate the alternative, that there is a more innocent explanation for the scene, could also cost them their lives. The two officers thought that Rice was in possession of a potentially real gun and perceived his age to be between 18 and 20. [10] [11] [12] Yet still, missing from common and case law is implicit bias and how the perceived race of Rice may have contributed to the deadly interaction. What is left unsaid is that police officers are seven times more likely to shoot unarmed Black people than they are White people. [13] Black male bodies are viewed as older and more aggressive.

Interactions do not occur in a vacuum. Given the current national discourse on police brutality in the Black community and towards Black bodies, insights on race relations may offer a better evaluation of the reasonableness standard and address the concerns of the Black community and the perceived lack of justice from our criminal justice system when tragic events occur.

[1] Memorandum from S. Lamar Sims, Esq ., Investigation into the officer-involved shooting of Tamir Rice which occurred at Cudell Park, 1910 West Boulevard, Cleveland, OH, on November 22, 2014 (2015) [hereinafter Prosecutor Sims Report ], available at http://prosecutor.cuyahogacounty.us/pdf_prosecutor/en-US/Tamir%20Rice%20Investigation/Sims-Review%20of%20Deadly%20Force-Tamir%20Rice.pdf

[2] Id. at 2

[4] Rich Exner, Witness accounts in Tamir Rice investigation paint vivid picture of events . CLEVELAND.COM (June 13, 2015), http://www.cleveland.com/metro/index.ssf/2015/06/witness_accounts_in_tamir_rice.html

[5] Prosecutor Sims Report , supra Note 1, at 14

[6] Press Release, U.S. Dep’t of Justice Civil Rights Division, Investigation of the Cleveland Div. of Police, (Dec. 12, 2014)(on file with author)

[7] State v. Goff , 942 N.E. 2 nd 1075, 1082 (Ohio 2010)

[8] Tennessee v. Garner , 471. U.S. 1, 11 (1985) (while the report cites to this case, the holding has been viewed negatively by the courts.)

[9] Graham v. Connor, 490 U.S. 386, 396 (1989)

[10] Prosecutor Sims Report , supra Note 1, at 5

[11] Id. at 8

[12] Id. at 7

[13] Sandhya Somashekhar et al., Black and Unarmed , WASHINGTON POST, (Aug. 8, 2015), http://www.washingtonpost.com/sf/national/2015/08/08/black-and-unarmed/

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Tamir elijah rice (2002–2014).

The shooting death of twelve-year-old Tamir Rice in 2014 brought increased attention to the national debate on interactions between police officers and African Americans. Tamir Elijah Rice was born to Samaria Rice and Leonard Warner on June 15, 2002, in Cleveland, Ohio. At times, Rice’s family life was turbulent as Warner was convicted of domestic violence against Samaria Rice in 2010, while Rice herself pled guilty to drug trafficking charges in 2013. Tamir Rice, who appeared older than twelve because of his 195-pound frame, attended sixth grade at Marion-Seltzer Elementary School in Cleveland. He was described as a pleasant young man who enjoyed art and playing sports.

On November 22, 2014, Rice was walking in a park outside the Cudell Recreation Center, a place he frequented. Rice had a Black Airsoft pellet gun, without the orange safety indicator usually found on the barrel, and was playing with it around the park. A 911 caller reported Rice’s activities but expressed uncertainty to the dispatcher about whether the gun was real. Two Cleveland police officers, Timothy Loehmann and Frank Garmback, both white, responded to the call but were not informed that the gun might be a fake. Security camera footage showed a police cruiser driven by the forty-six-year-old Garmback, who had been with the force since 2008, race into the frame and stop.

Within two seconds, Loehmann had opened the passenger door and fired two shots at Rice, who was approximately ten feet away. Loehmann claimed he had told Rice to raise his hands three times as the car pulled up, but Rice failed to obey. This could not be verified independently since the footage did not have audio. Rice, who fell to the ground immediately after being shot, died the next day in the hospital. Officer Loehmann was a twenty-six-year-old rookie who had been on the job in Cleveland for eight months. Prior to this, he had been rejected for police jobs in several nearby towns and cities, as well as the Cuyahoga County Sheriff’s Department. Loehmann was hired by the police department in Independence, Ohio, but resigned in November 2012 after a poor performance review.

The timing of these events came on the heels of the Michael Brown case in Ferguson, Missouri, and the beginnings of the Black Lives Matter movement . Several hundred protesters gathered in downtown Cleveland on November 25 in response to both Rice’s killing and the decision not to indict the police officer who fatally had shot the unarmed eighteen-year-old Brown in August 2014. Demonstrators temporarily blocked rush-hour traffic after marching down an exit ramp to a busy freeway.

Tamir Rice’s funeral was held on December 3, 2014, at Mt. Sinai Baptist Church. On October 27, 2015, a grand jury began hearing the Tamir Rice case. Officers Loehmann and Garmback were subpoenaed and appeared in front of the grand jury on December 1 to read their sworn statements. On December 28, the grand jury returned a decision not to indict either officer in the deadly shooting. On January 1, 2016, more than one hundred protesters marched to the home of Cuyahoga County Prosecutor Tim McGinty in West Cleveland. Police accompanied the group along the way and stood in McGinty’s driveway but did not intervene as demonstrators repeatedly called for the prosecutor’s resignation. McGinty lost his bid for re-election in March 2016 after a single tumultuous term.

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Nick Fagge & Lydia Warren, “Exclusive: ‘My 12-year-old grandson was outright MURDERED by police,’ [London] Daily Mail , November 28, 2014, http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2853266/My-12-year-old-grandson-MURDERED-police-Family-black-boy-BB-gun-shot-dead-not-putting-hands-breaks-silence-slam-officers-killed-him.html ; Andrew Tobias, “Portrait of Tamir Rice emerges from investigators’ interviews,” Cleveland.com, June 13, 2015, http://www.cleveland.com/metro/index.ssf/2015/06/portrait_of_tamir_rice_emerges.html ; “Interactive: Tamir Rice Timeline,” Cleveland19.com. June 3, 2015, http://www.cleveland19.com/story/29230520/tamir-rice-timeline ; “Tamir Rice Protesters March to Prosecutor’s Home, Demand Resignation,” NBCNews.com , January 1, 2106, http://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/tamir-rice-protesters-march-prosecutor-s-home-demand-resignation-n489071 ; Andrew Tobias, “Timothy Loehmann, the Cleveland cop who shot Tamir Rice, failed the Cuyahoga County Sheriff’s Department’s written entrance exam.” Cleveland.com, January 7, 2015, http://www.cleveland.com/metro/index.ssf/2015/01/timothy_loehmann_the_cleveland.html .

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The Tamir Rice Story: How to Make a Police Shooting Disappear

The prosecutor pacing in front of the witness was holding a toy gun that looked like a real gun, which was the same kind of toy the boy had been playing with the day he got shot. A rookie Cleveland police officer had fired twice at close range, and one bullet hit the boy just left of his belly button, carved downward through his intestines and a major vein, and embedded in his pelvis an inch to the right of center.

The witness, a retired cop named Roger Clark, thought the gun was a curious prop for a grand jury. The boy was dead, and had been for more than a year. He’d been accused of no crime, ever. Why the toy? There is no need for theatrics in grand-jury proceedings. They are entirely one-sided forums. Prosecutors decide what witnesses to call and what evidence to present. They instruct the grand jurors, ordinary citizens drawn from the same pool as trial jurors, on the law. There is no defense present because the most a grand jury can do is issue an indictment, which means only that there’s enough evidence of a crime that a judge or jury should sort it out. It is a very low threshold, and it is reached as a matter of plodding routine. It also is done entirely in secret. Who was a prop supposed to impress?

Clark wasn’t even there to testify about the boy. The grand jury was investigating two Cleveland police officers—the rookie who ﬁred and his veteran partner—to determine if there was probable cause to believe that they’d acted unreasonably and unlawfully when they drove to within ten feet of the boy and, even before stopping, shot him. Clark is an expert in that general area, police shootings. He spent more than 27 years with the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department, where, among other things, he taught officers the proper use of force, investigated officers who used deadly force, and helped write tactical deployment guidelines designed to minimize the use of force. Since he retired in 1993, he has studied hundreds of fatal use-of-force incidents, and he has testiﬁed many dozens of times in state and federal courts.

Clark had studied all of the available evidence in this case—video, witness statements, forensic reconstructions—and he had prepared a report detailing his ﬁndings. He did not believe the officers acted reasonably, and he did not believe the shooting was justiﬁed. When he was called to testify, on December 7, he expected he would summarize those opinions, answer a few clarifying questions, then be dismissed with a polite thank-you for his time and effort.

“Instead,” he told me, “it was immediately very hostile.”

There were two prosecutors in the room. The ﬁrst sat with the grand jurors at a big U-shaped conference table, as if he were one of them, not an officer of the court presenting evidence. Clark thought he smirked a lot. The other, the one pacing with the toy gun, he smirked, too. “The facial expressions, the body language...disdain,” Clark said. “Yeah, that’s a good word: disdain .”

The prosecutors reminded Clark, and the grand jurors, that the officers had responded to a 911 call about a black male with a gun in a park—an “active shooter,” they said, though no shots had been ﬁred, there was no one nearby to be shot when police arrived, and the black male turned out to be a 12-year-old boy alone in a gazebo. Active shooter . The phrase was used repeatedly, Clark told me. “They had to be brave,” the pacing prosecutor, Matthew Meyer, said. “They were brave that day.” Or maybe they were reckless, which was one of Clark’s conclusions. Maybe if they hadn’t ridden up in a frenzy, the boy wouldn’t be dead. There’s case law about that, Clark started to explain, opinions that can help deﬁne whether force was used appropriately.

Meyer started pacing again.

A California Supreme Court case, Clark continued, explicitly held that a shooting should be considered in a context broader than the instant the trigger was pulled. That did not suggest a cop should be second-guessed back to his morning coffee.

But if an officer, through tactical incompetence or outright belligerence, created the circumstance that put him in fear for his life...

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The prosecution argued that video-surveillance footage showed Rice reaching for his toy gun before he was shot.

Meyer stopped, pivoted, swung his arm up, aimed his fake gun at Clark’s face. “Does he have to point it at you like this before you shoot?” Clark remembered Meyer asking. “That would scare you, right?” Clark looked at him for a moment. “No,” he said. He’d had guns pointed at him before. But it would scare most people. Probably scare the good citizens sitting on a grand jury in a city with a miserably high crime rate.

The prop was for them. But it was only theater. Because the boy never pointed a gun at a cop. He wasn’t given the chance to even put his hands up.

If you didn’t know him, or don’t know his city, or if you simply are too exhausted to sift one story from all the others, you might vaguely remember him as the kid who got killed in Cleveland during that period, from roughly the summer of 2014 through the spring of 2015, when black people getting killed by police received an unusual amount of national attention. Tamir was shot on November 22, 2014, which was after John Crawford in Dayton and Michael Brown in Ferguson but before Rumain Brisbon in Phoenix and Walter Scott in South Carolina.

The grand jury in late December declined to indict either officer involved in killing Tamir, and the city of Cleveland denied anyone did anything wrong when, in April 2016, it agreed to pay his estate, his mother, Samaria, and his sister Tajai $6 million. The news reports and most of the columns and commentaries that followed those events invariably summarized his death as an awful mistake: Tamir had been playing with a toy gun that the police mistook for a real one when he reached into his waistband, which is why the rookie shot him within seconds of arriving in Cudell park. A “perfect storm of human error, mistakes, and miscommunications by all involved,” Cuyahoga County prosecutor Timothy J. McGinty said. The grand jury had been thorough and diligent, he said. The grand jury had heard all the facts and had reached a reasoned, if difficult, decision. That he agreed with the decision, and released a 74-page report explaining why, was secondary; a panel of fair-minded citizens, he stressed, had settled the matter.

There was a dreary, routine trajectory from that point. The city would pay to settle the civil suit, of course. Then months would pass and memories would get foggy— Tamir? was that the kid in Cleveland? —until all that was left was a mushy insistence that no one was really to blame for a dead kid. The activists could make all the noise they wanted, but reasonable people would have to agree to disagree. “If you don’t trust the grand jury,” McGinty said, quoting a local judge, “you don’t trust your neighbors.”

That is disingenuous. Grand jurors, almost without exception, follow where prosecutors lead them. And when they don’t return indictments in high-proﬁle cases, it’s almost always because the prosecutor does not want them to. That he makes that preference known, whether explicitly or implicitly, in the secret conﬁnes of the grand-jury room makes it no less deliberate.

Since he took office, in January 2013, McGinty has presented, or has promised to present, evidence related to every police killing of a civilian in Cuyahoga County—20 in three years—to a grand jury. The reason, he repeated after the December non-indictment, was to increase transparency, to “end the traditional system where the prosecutor privately reviewed police reports, then decided if an officer should be charged. That secrecy—which appeared arbitrary without a public investigative report—undermined community conﬁdence.”

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But there is nothing in that traditional system—which remains the system for everyone except, apparently, police officers—that requires reviews to be done privately. McGinty can distribute public records; he can consult outside experts and release their analyses; he can even publish a 74-page report explaining why he decided a shooting was justiﬁed or not. That is, after all, the job he was elected to do.

Grand-jury proceedings, on the other hand, are by law secret. (McGinty’s office, in fact, stressed that point: Clark and other witnesses “can characterize their experience before the Grand Jury in any way they want, but prosecutors cannot reveal what was said or done in the room,” a spokesman e-mailed me. “So by deﬁnition, you’re only getting one side.”) What evidence is presented and how is not a matter of public record. Nor is whether a witness is treated with deference or, to borrow phrasing from that 74-page report, as one of the “purported experts” hired by lawyers “representing the Rice family in a federal civil lawsuit.” Only the beginning and the end of the process—the apparently reckless shooting of a black child and the grand jury’s decision that that killing was not unreasonable—are truly public. Everything in between is either cloaked in legal secrecy or dribbled out in carefully choreographed press releases. And when it’s over, when the details are sufficiently blurred and the story is effectively muddled, the prosecutor can take refuge behind those anonymous grand jurors when he declares the whole episode to be nothing more than a sad accident.

That’s how a dead child, how Tamir Rice, eventually becomes a half-remembered name on a long and miserable list of other half-remembered names. When strangers think of him, if they think of him, it will be with a weary sigh as they try to sort out which one he was, and where. Maybe they will recall something about a toy gun and the cops thinking it was real and, well, mistakes happen—because isn’t that what the grand jury’s decision effectively meant?

Yes, it is. And this is how they were led to that conclusion.

The park where Tamir got shot is a couple hundred yards from where he lived, in a row house across Madison Avenue on the west side of Cleveland. Samaria had moved to that neighborhood the previous March partly because Cudell park was so close. There was a rec center on the north side, where Tamir and his sister had been going for years, and there was a school on the south side, where Tamir was in the sixth grade. Samaria would check the park every now and again, make sure no dope boys were loitering about. But between that and the school and the rec center, she ﬁgured her children were safe.

Tamir was at Cudell by midmorning on the Saturday he got shot. Usually he’d play basketball or Ping-Pong or games on an old phone that could connect to the rec-center Wi-Fi. But his friend had an Airsoft pellet gun his dad bought him at Walmart, a replica of a Colt 1911 semi-automatic. It was supposed to have an orange tip on the barrel, except it stopped working once and Tamir’s friend took it apart and ﬁxed it but couldn’t get the orange part back on. They traded, Tamir and his friend, a cell phone for the pellet gun, but only for the day: Tamir knew he’d catch hell if his mom found out he was playing with a toy gun.

He shot BBs at a few car tires in the parking lot, showed his friend how they didn’t go straight. He knew enough to put the gun in his backpack when he went inside the rec center, though. He was there almost every day, never caused a problem and wasn’t going to start.

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Samaria gave Tamir and his sister turkey sandwiches and fruit when they came home for lunch, and a few dollars to get chips and juice from the corner store. Then they went back to Cudell. Tamir was inside the rec center for a while, then outside, back and forth for more than an hour. On the sidewalk out front, he played with the pellet gun, drawing and pointing at pretend people and, sometimes, real people. No one seemed alarmed, though. Everyone knew Tamir, knew he was a kid, knew he was playing. Even if they didn’t, Tamir didn’t appear menacing: A man named Joe who was 81 and came to practice with an old-timers’ basketball league saw Tamir pointing his gun at the ground only a few feet away and just ignored him.

A little after three o’clock, a guy with a tall-boy showed up in the park to wait for a 3:30 bus downtown. He didn’t know Tamir. He saw a baby-faced guy, ﬁve feet seven, almost 200 pounds—Tamir was a big kid—pulling a gun in and out of his pants. Acting all gangsta, he thought. The man called 911 at 3:22. He was a little slurry, but not frantic. He politely asked the operator how she was, then told her he was sitting in a park. “There’s a guy in here with a pistol,” he said, “and, you know, it’s probably fake, but he’s, like, pointing it at everybody.” The operator asked him where he was, exactly, and the caller repeated what he said the ﬁrst time: “The guy keeps pulling it in and out of his pants—it’s probably fake, but you know what? He’s scaring the shit out of me.” He described Tamir’s clothes and then reported the guy with the pistol had moved to one of the swings on the playground. “Probably a juvenile, you know?” Finally: “He’s right nearby the, you know, the youth center or whatever, and he keeps pulling it in and out of his pants. I don’t know if it’s real or not.”

The 911 operator’s notes were passed to a dispatcher, who requested a squad car respond to Cudell park. She said there was a black male sitting on the swings, and she described his clothing. “So he keeps pulling a gun out of his pants and pointing it at people,” she said.

Another dispatcher cut in. “How many calls are we getting for that?”

“Nah, just the one so far.”

She left out the words probably fake and probably a juvenile , and categorized it as a Code 1 call, the highest priority.

At a church a mile south of Cudell, officer Frank Garmback was ﬁnishing up a false-alarm call with his partner, Timothy Loehmann, a probationary rookie who’d been on the force for about nine months and only patrolling the streets for about three. Garmback, in fact, was Loehmann’s ﬁeld-training officer, responsible for teaching him how to become a proper police officer.

That was something at which Loehmann had failed multiple times. Almost two years earlier, he’d resigned from the police department in suburban Independence, which was going to ﬁre him if he didn’t. In less than ﬁve months—most of which he’d spent at the academy—he’d been caught twice lying to his superiors, and he’d had his weapon taken away after a weepy breakdown on the shooting range. That was about a woman.

Being unable to separate his personal problems from the job, Deputy Chief Jim Polak wrote, “leads one to believe that he would not be able to substantially cope, or make good decisions, during or resulting from any other stressful situation.”

Emotional immaturity is the phrase Polak used in a ﬁve-page memo listing all the reasons Loehmann shouldn’t be a cop. “I do not believe time, nor training, will be able to change or correct these deﬁciencies,” he wrote.

But Loehmann kept at it. He applied to four other departments but got no offers. In September 2013, he failed the written exam for the Cuyahoga County Sheriff’s Department. Three months later, the Cleveland Division of Police gave him a conditional appointment. On March 3, 2014, he was hired as a patrolman.

Garmback drove. Cudell was a straight shot north on West Boulevard, across Madison, and into a parking lot separated from the playground by knee-high wooden posts. But Garmback took a different route, to a narrow block that dead-ends at the park. There were no posts there, only a few spindly trees.

The squad car bumped over the curb. The swings were empty. The only person anywhere nearby, in fact, was sitting at a concrete picnic table under a gazebo a few yards beyond the swings. He was not ﬁddling with a gun. He wasn’t doing anything at all.

Garmback did not stop.

Tamir stood up, took a few casual steps around the table.

Garmback braked. The squad car slid on wet grass dusted with snow. When it was even with Tamir, before it had stopped, Loehmann got out and ﬁred. The muzzle of his gun was less than seven feet away.

Tamir collapsed.

Garmback radioed that shots had been ﬁred. Black male down. Send an ambulance.

He and Loehmann did not help the boy on his back on a slab of cement, his small intestine spilling out of the hole in his abdomen. For four minutes, Tamir lay bleeding alone.

Survillance cameras recorded the entire encounter. Had Garmback and Loehmann been a couple of local gangbangers in a Toyota, that video would have been enough to convince a grand jury that there was probable cause to believe a crime had been committed, most likely aggravated murder. It happened so quickly, and with the shooter approaching the victim, that a claim of self-defense would have been laughable.

But police officers are not held to the same standards as civilians, nor should they be. They are expected to insert themselves into potentially volatile situations, to confront bad guys with weapons, to stand between chaos and public order. They will at times, even if only for a heartbeat, genuinely fear for their lives or the lives of others. There is a library of case law giving officers wide leeway on the use of deadly force. But these two guys drove up and shot a kid. And it’s on video. “What we have is objective evidence that they summarily executed this child as fast as humanly possible,” says Jonathan S. Abady, one of the attorneys representing Tamir’s estate, mother, and sister. “There is nothing Tamir could have done to not get shot that day.”

Maybe a jury would never convict them, and maybe McGinty would somehow believe the shooting was justiﬁed. But the major evidence to make that initial decision—whether to seek an indictment or not—was plainly visible. Weeks passed and McGinty did not make a determination one way or the other. Winter came and went and then most of spring. In early June, the sheriff’s department gave McGinty’s office a 211-page summary of its investigation. A week later, a sitting judge, ruling on a petition from eight perturbed citizens, issued a non-binding opinion that there was probable cause to charge both officers with crimes, including murder (Loehmann) and negligent homicide (Garmback). “After viewing [the video] several times,” Judge Ronald B. Adrine wrote, “this court is still thunderstruck by how quickly this event turned deadly.”

Still, no decision from McGinty.

Finally, at a meeting in the beginning of summer, almost seven months after Tamir was killed, Abady and his colleagues asked what was taking so long. An assistant prosecutor, according to Abady, said McGinty was trying to be “fair and thorough.” He also said he was trying to ﬁnd experts who could tell a grand jury whether the shooting was justiﬁed.

That is highly irregular. For one, experts rarely testify before grand jurors. The bar for an indictment is so low that any prosecutor with a functional ability to speak in complete sentences can clear it. Two, if an expert believes killing Tamir was legally permissible, what’s the point? If the prosecutor agrees, why waste the grand jury’s time?

But set all that aside. Stipulate that fairness and thoroughness require experts to testify. There are many well-credentialed and prominent scholars who study police procedure; credible ones are not difficult to ﬁnd. Who, Abady wanted to know, are those experts upon whom McGinty would be relying?

“People,” Abady was told, “who you’ve never heard of.”

The first two experts McGinty hired were a prosecutor from Colorado and a former FBI agent who’s now an associate professor.

S. Lamar Sims, the prosecutor, was familiar to McGinty already: He’d spoken at a March 12, 2015, forum on deadly force hosted by McGinty’s office, focusing speciﬁcally on how difficult it is, legally, to indict officers. Two months after that, in May, Sims had explained on a local Denver TV channel how he believed killings by police should be evaluated. “Often we will learn things, facts, after the incident that a reasonable officer did not know, or could not have known, at the time,” he said. “The community may react to facts learned later. For example, looking around the nation, say you have a 12- or 13-year-old boy with a toy gun. We learn that later. The question is, what did the officer know at the time? What should a reasonable peace officer have known at the time when he or she took the steps that led to the use of physical force or deadly physical force?” That, he said, “is a difficult thing for a lot of people to understand.”

Kimberly A. Crawford, the professor, was a supervisory special agent in the legal instruction unit at the FBI academy for 18 years. In that role, she co-authored a report that defended a sniper in the shooting of a ﬂeeing woman during the Ruby Ridge standoff in 1992, which a Department of Justice task force later criticized in part for interpreting legal standards on deadly force in a manner too favorable to law enforcement.

Both Sims and Crawford focused only on the instant immediately before Loehmann ﬁred, which, in their view, was the only legally relevant issue. Neither spoke to Loehmann or Garmback, but how was either officer supposed to know Tamir was a kid and the gun he might have had was a toy? Of course, stopping a few feet from Tamir gave them no time to learn either of those facts. But since they did, Crawford reasoned, “it becomes apparent that not only was Officer Loehmann required to make a split-second decision, but also that his response was a reasonable one.” Meanwhile, to question that tactical decision, Sims argued, “is to engage in exactly the kind of ‘Monday morning quarterbacking’ the case law exhorts us to avoid.” (Crawford called it “armchair quarterbacking.” In her analysis, “Whether the officers’ actions were courageous or foolhardy is not relevant to a constitutional review of the subsequent use of force.”)

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Samaria Rice with her daughter Tajai at the gazebo where Tamir was shot.

McGinty released both of those reports to the public by posting them on his office’s website at eight o’clock on the Saturday night of Columbus Day weekend. Zoe Salzman, an attorney who works with Abady, remembers the time because she got her ﬁrst phone call from a reporter at 8:01. That would suggest the reports were shared with the media before they were posted. They were not, however, shared with Samaria Rice or her attorneys. “They gave us no heads-up that those reports were coming,” Salzman says. And by the time they returned from the holiday weekend and began to adequately critique the reports, the news cycle had moved on.

A third report, from a former Florida sheriff and consultant named W. Ken Katsaris—whom McGinty had hired to testify against a police officer in a previous case—was released on a Thursday in November. He, too, found the shooting justiﬁed. That perspective was not shared with Samaria Rice or her attorneys before it was posted. McGinty, in a statement released with the Katsaris report, said that he was being open and transparent and most deﬁnitely wasn’t drawing any conclusions but rather laying off that responsibility on the grand jurors. “I have faith in the people of this county,” he said, “to fulﬁll their sworn duty to make a correct and honorable decision.”

By the middle of November 2015, almost a year after Tamir was killed, McGinty still wouldn’t say whether he thought either officer should be charged with a crime. But he had presented to the grand jury—and released to the public—the opinions of three experts that, in clear and conﬁdent language, absolved Garmback and Loehmann.

At a political forum on November 5, McGinty had also introduced another element into the public narrative his office was crafting: Samaria Rice was trying to make a buck off her dead boy. When he was asked about criticisms Abady and others had made of the Sims and Crawford reports (Katsaris wouldn’t be released for another week), he answered, “Well, isn’t that interesting. They waited until they didn’t like the reports they received. They’re very interesting people, let me just leave it at that. They have their own economic motives.” He later tried to walk that back, saying he’d meant Samaria’s representatives were gold diggers. In a way, that was even worse, as it implied she was too stupid to realize she was being manipulated by greedy lawyers.

At that same forum, McGinty also invoked the sacred secrecy of the grand-jury process. “We want to encourage people to come in, be able to tell the truth, without intimidation, in the search for the truth,” he said. That would seem in obvious conﬂict with his vows of transparency, but no matter. As part of that search, he’d invited Samaria’s attorneys to go ﬁnd their own experts on police shootings.

That’s how Roger Clark, the retired cop who got the toy gun stuck in his face, became involved. If a prosecutor presenting his own experts to a grand jury is uncommon, bringing in experts hired by the victim of a shooting is unprecedented. “It puts the victim in the unusual position of having to be the advocate,” says Earl Ward, one of the lawyers for Tamir’s family. “No, unusual is too light: I’ve never heard of it. In my 30 years of experience, this is the ﬁrst time.”

In more than 20 years, Clark had testiﬁed once as an expert before a grand jury, but never as one retained by the dead person’s family. And Jeffrey J. Noble, another consultant hired on behalf of Tamir, had never done so at all. He was a cop for 28 years, retiring as deputy chief of the Irvine, California, police department in 2012. He wrote chapters for police textbooks on tactical recklessness and the notorious code of silence among officers; co-wrote a book on internal-affairs investigations; and, as a consultant, has reviewed hundreds of use-of-force cases. As a cop, he also used deadly force.

Noble knew Clark only by professional reputation and in fact had disagreed with him in another use-of-force case. But he agreed that the shooting of Tamir was unjustiﬁed, and for the same reasons. McGinty’s experts focused only on the fraction of a second when Loehmann ﬁred: a police officer only a few feet from a ﬁve-foot-seven 195-pound person who matched the description of a man reported to have a gun who was reaching into his waistband. If all of that were true—though the part about where Tamir’s hands were and what they were doing is in legitimate dispute—it was reasonable for Loehmann to fear for his life, according to Sims, Crawford, and Katsaris.

But the few seconds before that, Noble argued, were just as important, both legally and practically. Under accepted police standards, Loehmann never should have been that close to Tamir that quickly. When they entered the park, the officers saw, or should have seen, one person, alone, not threatening anyone. There was no need for Garmback to rush him. “Reasonable police officers responding to a man-with-a-gun call,” Noble wrote in his report, “would have stopped their vehicle prior to entering the park to visually survey the area to avoid driving upon a subject who may be armed. This serves not only to protect the officers, but also serves to protect others who may be in the area and provides both time and distance for the officers to evaluate the situation and develop a plan.”

Noble’s function, admittedly unusual, was simply to give the grand jurors another learned perspective. Neither his opinion nor those of Clark, Sims, and the others could be used to convict or acquit anyone. “As an expert,” Noble says, “my job is to educate.” A grand jury is not contentious. Witnesses are almost never cross-examined, and normally there’s no time, anyway. A typical grand jury in Cuyahoga County churns through 50 cases a day, mostly on little more than the word of a police officer. Noble expected to present his ﬁndings, answer a question or two, and be done.

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Noble was retrieved by assistant prosecutor James Gutierrez and led to the grand-jury room, where 14 jurors sat in comfortable chairs around tables arranged in a U. Gutierrez took a seat in the center. Matt Meyer sat on Noble’s right. Noble was sworn in. Then, he says, “it devolved pretty quickly. It was an attack from the minute I walked into the room.” Noble says Gutierrez and Meyer tag-teamed him with questions, talking over each other and him. Early on, one of them declared more than asked, “You’re getting paid to be here, right?”

“Hey, wait, your experts are getting paid, too,” Noble said.

“You don’t know that.”

He says he was asked if it “would be in the family’s best interest if there was an indictment.” He was reminded, as if he were a simpleton, that the grand jury had to be exceedingly conscientious. “Justice is about proving that some are not guilty,” Meyer said. “These officers have rights, too.”

Well, yes, but it’s not the prosecutors’ job to prove that to a grand jury. “I’ve never had to ﬁght so hard to defend myself in the midst of a presentation,” Noble told me. “And I’ve deﬁnitely never seen two prosecutors play defense attorney so well.”

The hostility toward Noble, he realized, was part of a piece, reducing him to a character—hired gun for vengeful family and greedy lawyers trying to ruin brave cops—in a story that had already been laid out for the grand jurors. Tamir, as would later happen with Clark, repeatedly was referred to as an active shooter. Sandy Hook and San Bernardino (which had happened ﬁve days earlier) were both invoked. Video was projected of Tamir playing with the pellet gun earlier in the day, juxtaposed with video of kids playing basketball inside the rec center. For Loehmann and Garmback, only what they knew in a single blink of time was relevant. But for the dead kid, his entire day was fair game, as was what other people were doing inside a nearby building.

It was not difficult to ﬁgure out the prosecution’s theory of the case, which was really a defense theory. Near the end of Noble’s testimony, one of the grand jurors, a white lady he guessed was in her late 50s, had a question. “You’re from California, and maybe they do things differently out there,” she began. “But I’m a mom, and I would have wanted the police to protect my kid if he was playing in the rec center that day. He could have gone in there and killed all those people playing basketball.”

The woman was very sincere. “She was not being mean-spirited at all,” Noble said. “What I got out of that was the emotional level they’d been brought to.”

That Tamir could not possibly have killed anyone seemed beside the point.

Loehmann and Garmback were not required to testify or answer any questions from prosecutors. No target of a grand jury can be forced to do so. Even if he was ordered to appear, he could still invoke his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination at any time. As a practical matter, then, a prosecutor won’t invite a grand-jury target to appear. Why allow him to make a self-serving statement if the prosecutor can’t cross-examine, can’t poke holes in his story, can’t point out contradictions and inconsistencies, can’t pick at his credibility? How could the grand jurors realistically judge the veracity of those statements? On the other hand, a target has no real incentive to appear, either: Why risk saying something stupid that can be used against him later?

But at the beginning of December, both Loehmann and Garmback agreed to testify—sort of. Each man brought with him a written statement dated November 30, 2015, more than a year after Tamir was shot dead. Each officer read his statement to the grand jury.

Garmback’s was self-serving, Loehmann’s was self-aggrandizing, and both raised serious questions. For instance, both said they did not see Tamir seated at the picnic table until they were at least even with the swing set—that is, until they were a few yards away from the supposedly armed suspect they’d been sent to investigate. Were they always so lax in their visual surveillance? Both also agreed Garmback said, “Watch him, he’s going to run,” and that they were afraid Tamir was going to run toward the rec center. What, exactly, made them think Tamir would run? And if they believed that, why did Garmback approach from an angle that would almost force Tamir to bolt in that direction? Why not position the cruiser between Tamir and the rec center? Why stop next to him at all, instead of driving away from what might be a mortal threat?

Loehmann, meanwhile, testiﬁed that in his few months on the job, he’d already been “involved in many active-shooter situations.” Really? How loosely does Loehmann deﬁne “active-shooter situation”? Do shots actually need to be ﬁred? By the common deﬁnition, the last active shooter in Cuyahoga County was a man who shot his wife and daughters in a Cracker Barrel in 2012.

Loehmann said he and Garmback repeatedly yelled “Show me your hands” as they approached Tamir. (Garmback acknowledged the windows were up, which would have made shouting orders pointless.) “As car is slid [sic] , I started to open the door and yelled continuously ‘show me your hands’ as loud as I could,” he said. “The suspect lifted his shirt reached [sic] down into his waistband. We continued to yell ‘show me your hands.’ I was focused on the suspect. Even when he was reaching into his waistband, I didn’t ﬁre. I still was yelling the command ‘show me your hands.’ ”

Loehmann said he’d been trained to leap out of the car “because ‘the cruiser is a coffin.’ ” He said he tried to get to the back of the cruiser. He said he and Garmback “were still yelling ‘show me your hands.’ With his hands pulling the gun out and his elbow coming up, I knew it was a gun and it was coming out. I saw the weapon in his hands coming out of his waistband and the threat to my partner and myself was real and active.”

That’s when he ﬁred twice.

The most obvious of the many questions Loehmann’s testimony raised was: How does that version square with a video showing that Loehmann pulled the trigger almost immediately after opening the car door? How fast can he yell “Show me your hands,” and how much time will he give a suspect to comply?

There may be plausible, even credible, answers to those questions. But none of them were asked. Instead, after reading his statement, each officer invoked his Fifth Amendment rights.

That could not possibly have been unexpected.

Thanksgiving Weekend 2015, Earl Ward was told by Meyer that McGinty’s office had hired a video expert to enhance and analyze footage from cameras around Cudell park, and that his report was going to be released—once again, the Saturday of a holiday weekend. But there was nothing new in the analysis, Meyer said, nothing of any consequence revealed in the enhancements.

That appeared to be true. The two videos weren’t so much enhanced as synced and broken down into stills. The images were still grainy. They did not show Tamir pointing anything at the police, or even getting anything out of his trousers. But to McGinty’s expert, who specializes in the software used to record video and in teasing out information hidden in the small variances between pixels, they clearly showed Tamir reaching into his waistband an instant before Loehmann shot him.

To Jesse Wobrock, an expert in biomechanics hired by Abady’s ﬁrm, they showed that Tamir had his hands in his pockets when Loehmann ﬁred, and that the upward movement of the boy’s arms was a reaction to getting hit with a bullet, not a prelude to it.

To a layman, they are Rorschach blots. Stare at a still image long enough—as opposed to watching it ﬂash past in a half a second as part of a moving series—and the brain can be convinced either way. But McGinty’s version requires believing that a 12-year-old child rushed by two police officers reﬂexively reached for his toy gun. Wobrock’s version requires only accepting that a body will jerk when it gets shot.

And there was, to Wobrock, one new thing in the enhancement. When others had reviewed the raw video, they’d calculated that 1.7 seconds elapsed between Loehmann getting out of the cruiser and ﬁring. After seeing the individual images, Wobrock cut that to less than one second.

Wobrock appeared before the grand jury after Abady publicly complained about the way Noble and Clark had been treated. “My experience was probably more gentle than the others’,” Wobrock says. “But they were acting in a way like they were defense attorneys for the cops. Their line of questioning had to do with attacking me professionally.”

Meyer asked the questions. He showed images from the shooting, and videos that demonstrated that a person can pull a gun and shoot in less than half a second. He controlled those with a remote he’d stuck in his pants. “Today I have a remote in my waistband,” he joked with the grand jurors, “and not a gun.”

Mostly, Wobrock says, he was asked about his background in deciphering video code. He does not have any. Wobrock is an expert in forensic biomechanical engineering and kinematic analysis—how the body moves and reacts, particularly when it is being shot, beaten, or otherwise traumatized. “But if you have two eyes,” he says, “you can see what was going on in the video.”

Meyer brought up the civil suit pending in federal court—“Basically,” Wobrock says, “that the mom was looking for money out of this thing”—which cast Wobrock as just another hired gun for the money-grubbers. Who could trust his opinion, this academic who didn’t understand video-compression coding?

On the Monday after Christmas, McGinty announced that the grand jury had declined to indict either officer and that he had recommended no charges be brought.

The key evidence, both McGinty and Meyer said, was the enhanced video.

“You could actually see him draw his gun on this ﬁlm,” McGinty said.

Meyer, meanwhile, focused on a gray dot on the gazebo ﬂoor after Tamir had collapsed. That was the gun, he said. “For it to have fallen on the ground, it would have had to have been in Tamir’s hand,” he said. “Which means he would have had to have pulled that gun out.”

Those are both extremely debatable assertions. And neither, curiously, was mentioned when Meyer contacted Earl Ward a month earlier. Back then, there was nothing of any signiﬁcance at all in that enhanced video.

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Samaria Rice was the last witness to appear before the grand jury. She waited in the hallway of the courthouse while her daughter answered questions. Samaria didn’t want to tell me what her daughter was asked or how she answered, only that she was shaking when she came out. Her daughter had been there that day. Look at the video: Garmback and Loehmann watching a boy bleed to death, and she enters from the left. There’s no sound, but she’s screaming. “They killed my baby brother,” she shrieks. Garmback grabs her, takes her to the ground, handcuffs her, puts her in the back of the cruiser that’s next to her dying brother.

Samaria was still at home then. She was putting groceries away when two kids from the neighborhood banged on her door. “The police just shot your boy in the stomach,” they told her. She ran to the park, and the police told her she could stay with her daughter or go to the hospital with her son.

What could she do? She rode in the passenger seat of the ambulance.

The last time she saw Tamir alive, he had tubes stuck in his arms and his tongue lolled out of his mouth. And then he was dead. He was wrapped up like a tamale, she remembers, only his face showing, and she wailed and she sobbed and she tried to kiss him good-bye, but a police officer held her back. Her boy’s body was evidence and couldn’t be contaminated.

She sat before the grand jurors as a character in a script already written: Tamir had been acting all gangsta that day, Tamir had pulled a gun on the cops, Tamir could have killed everyone in the rec center. Any mom would have wanted the police to protect the children playing in the rec center and the park. Three experts said the police had no choice, said killing Tamir was a reasonable thing to do.

And Samaria? She was suing the city for wrongful death. Samaria wanted money. Samaria had a record: The day the police killed her son, she was on probation for selling weed. It didn’t matter that Samaria refused to ever live in the projects, that she’d moved to a white suburb so her kids could go to better schools and only moved back so her kids wouldn’t be the only black ones in class. It didn’t matter that she worried so much about her youngest two that she’d only recently let them off the porch to play.

The prosecutor asked her if she knew Tamir had a toy gun that day.

He asked her where he got that toy.

“The look he had on his face, it was almost like they were trying to blame me,” she said. “I’m saying in my head, Why are they talking to me like that? They were talking to me like I was a bad mother, like I gave him that BB gun.”

One of the grand jurors asked her what Tamir had been like. It was not an insincere question. But what does a mother say about the boy the police thought needed shooting? That he liked to draw and paint and make pottery at the rec center? That he helped his mother sweep and mop? That he liked the ice cream and French fries at McDonald’s and Cool Ranch Doritos and cereal, even if Samaria wouldn’t buy him the sugary ones?

Or that he wasn’t allowed to play with toy guns? Not even that cheap bright plastic one at the Dollar General?

What does any of it matter now?

Samaria wasn’t surprised that Garmback and Loehmann weren’t indicted. A prosecutor doesn’t spend a year laying the groundwork only to screw it up at the end. Maybe it wouldn’t sting as badly if McGinty had been forthright about it, if he’d made a decision and owned up to it and explained it, instead of dribbling out some parts and burying the rest in legal secrecy and ducking behind anonymous citizens, muddying rather than clarifying. But maybe not. No one was indicted, and no one would be.

Samaria knew the settlement was coming, and she wished it wouldn’t be public, thought maybe she should move away, to Charlotte or Lexington, another city where people won’t bother her at the gas station, at the store, on the street. People—strangers, a Cleveland police dispatcher—want to take selﬁes with her. “Once they recognize my face, it’s ‘Oh, let me give you a hug,’ ” she says. “Throwing themselves on my body, getting all in my personal space.”

They mean well. But still. Sometimes they say, “Oh, you’re that boy’s mom.”

Sometimes they say, “Oh, you’re Rice’s mom.” And sometimes, because enough time has passed and memories have gotten foggy and all the stories begin to blur together, people stop and stare and try to remember. “Oh,” they’ll say, certain but not really, “you’re Trayvon Martin’s mom.”

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How the Police and Legal Systems Failed Tamir Rice

Tamir Rice, 12, was killed by Ohio police officer Timothy Loehmann. Loehmann was not indicted for Rice’s death. Photo courtesy of wikipedia

About 20 minutes away from Cleveland, a young officer began his career as a police officer in Independence, Ohio. Timothy Loehmann, then 22, brought his personal problems to the training academy and couldn’t follow direction, according to his personnel file.

His problems grew to the point where Independence Deputy Police Chief Jim Polak wrote in a memorandum, “I do not believe time, nor training, will be able to change or correct these deficiencies.”

Loehmann reportedly didn’t want to stay with the Independence Police and yearned to work for the NYPD in New York City – where his friend lived. The department recommended that he should be fired, but Loehmann resigned on Dec. 5, 2012.

Just under two years later, Loehmann became a police officer in the Cleveland. When Loehmann was hired in 2014, Cleveland had the eighth highest violent crime rate in the nation. Loehmann’s father noted in an interview that his son “loved the action” compared to a quiet suburban neighborhood like Independence.

On Nov. 22, 2014, a police dispatch call came in saying a black male was sitting on a swing in the city park and pointing a gun at people. Loehmann and Officer Frank Garmback responded and arrived on the scene within minutes. However, the dispatcher failed to relay that the caller noted that the gun was probably a fake and the person was probably a kid.

The officers pulled up onto the grass no more than a few feet away from the suspect. Within two seconds of stopping their vehicle, Loehmann shot and killed 12-year-old Tamir Rice.

Rice had been tried, convicted and executed in just two seconds. He was, in the worst possible way, held “accountable” for pointing a “probably fake” gun at people. That same accountability was not applied to Loehmann, however, when a grand jury on Dec. 29, 2015 decided not to indict him in the killing of Rice.

The criminal justice system failed the Rice family on nearly every level.

Loehmann probably should have never been hired by the city of Cleveland in the first place. Their background check didn’t turn up Loehmann’s tumultuous past and review from Independence. When a police chief says, “I do not believe time, nor training, will be able to change or correct these deficiencies,” in regard to a trainee, it might not be the wisest idea to hire that person.

We don’t know if it would have made a difference, but the police dispatcher failed to mention that the caller stated it was probably a kid with a fake gun. The dispatcher put the officers in the mindset that they were walking into a volatile situation, instead of a potentially less tense scenario.

The officers offered no silver-linings in their actions after the shooting. Rice’s sister attempted to rush to the scene to find out what was going on, but video shows one of the officers immediately tackling her to the ground. No first-aid was administered to Rice until an FBI agent showed up. “I don’t think they knew what to do,” the FBI agent said. Loehmann immediately escalated the situation when he used his weapon and his ensuing behavior does not resemble the “Protect and Serve” motto that police officers swear by.

Finally, the last bastion of hope for justice for the Rice family – the courts – failed them too. FiveThirtyEight reported that prosecutors get an indictment over 99 percent of the time in federal cases. Yet, the grand jury failed to indict Loehmann in the killing of Rice. Although this wasn’t a federal case, the point still stands, as it is typically easy to secure an indictment.

Typically, yes, it is easy to secure an indictment. However, the prosecutor assigned to the case, Timothy McGinty, acted like the officers’ defense attorney rather than a prosecutor. McGinty allowed police officers to testify before the grand jury without any cross-examination on his part, according to the Rice family’s attorneys. To top it off, McGinty recommended that no charges be filed. Again, the prosecutor argued against charging the defendants. McGinty’s actions are shameful and flat-out embarrassing if he wants to be considered a prosecutor.

I’m not a lawyer and I can’t tell you whether the officers did something criminal. But, that is exactly what a trial is for. Without an indictment, the opportunity for a criminal trial is nearly non-existent and Loehmann and Garmback will never truly be held accountable.

Underpinning all of this is the big elephant in the room: Rice would not have been killed if he was white. A 66-year-old white woman pointed a BB gun like the one Rice had at police officers in Connecticut, but she was taken into custody unharmed. Dylann Roof, the alleged Charleston church shooter, was taken into custody unharmed. This is how it should be, but enough evidence has shown that you can’t expect that treatment if you are African-American.

We’ve seen too many examples of the criminal justice system not working equally for everyone. Police officers, it seems, can skate trial where the average American citizen almost certainly could not. Money can buy you the best possible defense, no matter the scenario. But if you can’t afford to shell out the money, then you might be forced to plea-bargain your way out or settle with an average defense. Instead being fair and working equally for everyone, the scales of justice are tipped in favor of those with power and wealth.

The bare minimum we can ask for is that a special, independent prosecutor be assigned to all cases brought against police officers. That ensures that there are no conflicts of interest between a prosecutor and police officer, at the very least.

This, however, doesn’t begin to address the whole laundry list of problems that need to be reformed in our criminal justice system. Individual communities won’t begin to trust law enforcement officers or the court system until everyone is held equally accountable, no matter the amount of money you have, your political power or the color of your skin.

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What everyone should know about the police killing of tamir rice (2002–2014).

Today, prosecutor Tim McGinty announced that he would not seek criminal charges against the officers involved in the fatal shooting of 12-year-old Tamir Rice, Timothy Loehmann and Frank Garmback. The decision came after a grand jury, which has been hearing evidence for three months, declined to issue an indictment. Rice’s family and others sharply criticized McGinty’s conduct throughout the grand jury process, arguing that he was manipulating the proceedings to the benefit of the officers.

Here are seven facts that everyone should know about the case.

1. The officer fatally shot Tamir Rice less than 2 seconds after exiting his police car.

This is according to the official report from the prosecutor: “Officer Loehman discharged his firearm within two seconds of exiting the car . Officer Loehmann fired two shots, one of which hit Tamir in the abdomen and caused him to fall in the area between the patrol car and the gazebo.”

The officers both claimed to have warned Rice multiple times before firing . None of the witnesses heard any of these “verbal commands.”

2. A state judge ruled there was probable cause to charge the officer who killed Tamir Rice with murder.

As the investigation dragged on activists “invoked a provision of Ohio law that allows citizens to bypass prosecutors and seek a judge’s opinion on whether cause exists to bring criminal charges.” The judge, Ronald B. Adrine, “found that sufficient cause exists to charge Loehmann with murder, involuntary manslaughter, reckless homicide, negligent homicide, and dereliction of duty .” He also found that Loehmann’s partner, Frank Garmback, could be charged with “negligent homicide and dereliction of duty.”

“After viewing it several times, this court is still thunderstruck by how quickly this event turned deadly ,” Judge Adrine wrote in his opinion.

The prosecutor ignored the judge’s ruling.

3. The officer who fatally shot Tamir Rice was deemed “unfit for duty” at the last police department where he worked.

As a member of the Independence Police Department in Ohio, Loehmann was described in his personnel file as “an emotionally unstable recruit with a ‘lack of maturity’ and ‘ inability to perform basic functions as instructed ’ during a weapons training exercise.”

A memo in Loehman’s file said “his handgun performance was dismal,” citing a “dangerous loss of composure” during training. He was in the process of being fired. From a letter in his file :

The Cleveland Police Department then hired Loehmann without reviewing his personnel file from Independance.

4. Neither officer involved in the shooting administered first aid to Rice after he was shot.

The Cleveland Plain Dealer reported :

Rice lay on the snow-covered grass beside the cruiser’s passenger side for four minutes as Loehmann, 26, took cover behind the trunk and Patrolman Frank Garmback, the driver, positioned himself opposite his partner near Rice’s body.

Rice wasn’t given first aid until a medically trained FBI agent on duty in the area arrived at the scene…

Matt Meyer, one of the prosecutors, brushed off the officers inaction saying the department “did not train their officers to administer first aid to gun shot victims.” Meyer added that Loehmann was dealing with a sprained ankle he sustained during the incident and Garmback was occupied with Rice’s 14-year-old sister, who he tackled and handcuffed.

5. The officers refused to testify but the prosecutor submitted their written statements to the jury.

This unusual accommodation was highly beneficial to the officers, allowing them to present their version of the events without being subject to any questioning .

“Submitting self-serving, unsworn written statements — rather than appearing live before the grand jury so that the officers’ versions of events are subject to vigorous cross examination — shows that these officers know their story will not withstand real scrutiny,” Subodh Chandra, an attorney for the Rice family, said.

6. The prosecutor commissioned reports from two “experts” with a history of sympathy toward police, then released them to the media.

McGinty commissioned reports of two out-of-state experts with a history of sympathy toward police, Kimberly Crawford, a retired FBI agent, and S. Lamar Sims, a Colorado-based prosecutor. Crawford and Sims concluded the officers conduct was “ reasonable .” These reports were presented to the grand jury and released to the media.

McGinty did not explain why he picked Crawford and Sims to produce reports.

Two months prior to releasing his report, Sims appeared on television and appeared to defend the officers shooting of Rice . Crawford produced a memo of use of force by law enforcement that was rejected by the Justice Department as too generous to the police.

Two experts in police use of force commissioned by the Rice family found “ the shooting was unjustified .” Those experts, Roger Clark and Jeffrey J. Noble, also found that the prosecutors reports “contradicted one another, made unfounded assumptions and ignored principles of police training.”

7. Explaining his decision not to press for an indictment, the prosecutor said “We don’t second-guess police officers.”

The job of the prosecutor, quite explicitly, is to reexamine the police officers conduct and to question the appropriateness of their actions. From the beginning, it appeared to be a task that was uncomfortable for prosecutor Timothy McGinty.

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On Sept. 4, US Solicitor General Elizabeth B. Prelogar answers questions on a range of topics, including her approach to oral argument and the Supreme Court's shadow docket.

For many, ruling in Tamir Rice case highlights need for reform

Anastazia Vanisko , Copy Editor | January 15, 2016

On Jan. 1, Clevelanders declared that it was a “New Year, No More.”

Over 100 people marched from Impett Park to the home of Cuyahoga County Prosecutor Timothy McGinty to protest the non-indictment of Officer Timothy Loehmann for the shooting of 12-year-old Tamir Rice.

Members of the Black Lives Matter movement, six of the Cleveland 8 (the activists who filed the affidavit that led a judge to find probable cause in the killing of Tamir Rice), students and anyone else who wanted to join gathered in below-freezing weather to protest the ruling.

One woman held a sign reading “Centuries of Injustice,” while others carried a banner with “WE DEMAND ACCOUNTABILITY #YearWithoutTamir” written on it. For four minutes, protestors lay side-by-side on the ground—a die-in representing the four minutes that Rice was unattended by Loehmann and Officer Frank Garmback before receiving medical attention.

McGinty had told the grand jury reviewing the Tamir Rice case that he didn’t believe it was possible to convict Loehmann. This statement came more than a year after the shooting, which occurred on Nov. 22, 2014, and only after the release of enhanced surveillance video. Based on this video, McGinty said it was “indisputable” that Rice was pulling his pellet gun from his waistband when Loehmann shot him. Under these circumstances, Loehmann was potentially taking the reasonable course of action since the police dispatch had failed to inform both him and Garmback that the gun was most likely a fake.

Under the law, Loehmann only needs to prove that he was thinking as any other reasonable officer in his situation would. But reasonable means different things to different people. There were multiple facets of the case to view in the light of reasonability. Was it reasonable to drive the vehicle up to Rice at that particular speed and to stop so close to him? Or would it have been reasonable to try to deescalate the situation from farther away?

“There are a lot of reasonable officers who wouldn’t have come up as close to Tamir Rice as he did,” said Dr. Rhonda Y. Williams, founder and director of the Social Justice Institute.

In reference to the standard of reasonability, Williams said, “Just because something is in the law doesn’t mean it’s just.”

This sense of unjustness is what drove Williams to march at the “New Year, No More” rally, and it is what drove her and others to be involved in protests and reform efforts over the year since the Tamir Rice shooting, and even before then.

“A child being shot is frustrating and saddening,” said Amanda King, a second-year law student at CWRU and a graduate diversity coordinator in the Office of Multicultural Affairs (OMA). “I’m tired of the police looking at young, and even adolescent, African-American men as criminals.”

King went to a public meeting at Cudell Recreation Center, where Tamir Rice was shot, that allowed civilians to speak with the police and public officials about their concerns a week after the shooting. She asked about police training—were police trained to know and identify special cases, such as one involving a child or mental illness?

The answer was no.

Williams and King were both appointed to serve as civilian members of the Cleveland Community Police Commission (CCPC). The CCPC was a result of the consent decree, which came from a Department of Justice investigation that discovered patterns and practice of excessive force within the Cleveland Police Department (CPD) and required that the City of Cleveland reform structural and systemic deficiencies in the CPD. The goal of the CCPC is to propose recommendations that, if approved and implemented, will update the CPD with 21st century policing tactics, such as de-escalation and bias-free policing.

The two women were sworn in to the CCPC on Sept. 8, 2015, along with eight other civilian appointees and three members of different police associations. So far, the police voice on the commission has proven just how hard it may be to change what is, in reality, an entire culture of policing.

“The police officers aren’t letting go of their affinity for the blue,” said King.

“[Change] is going to require police to be reform-minded,” said Williams. “Otherwise these [recommendations] could fall on deaf ears.”

Opportunities for education and involvement in activism related to the killing of Tamir Rice, however, have been occurring on campus since Spring 2015. The SJI organized a read-in of the DOJ report that led to the consent decree, along with many teach-ins regarding the various aspects of this issue—social movements in Cleveland, police brutality, etc.

“[I] encourage students to come to OMA to discuss this case and the surrounding reactions,” said Assistant Director of the OMA Randy Blackford. “It’s an important situation in our country, not only our region, and for students to be aware and involved in something in our own town is an opportunity to be involved in history.”

Anastazia Vanisko is copy editor for The Observer and writes for the news section. She is a third-year political science and dance double major, with minors...

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Grand jury says police shooting of Tamir Rice was legally justified. That's the problem.

by German Lopez

On Monday, Cuyahoga County Prosecutor Timothy McGinty announced a grand jury’s decision: There will be no criminal charges against the Cleveland police officers who shot and killed a 12-year-old boy in 2014. And unfortunately, it seems likely that this decision will soon mark the end of the media’s focus on this shooting — even though it shouldn’t.

Tamir Rice was playing at a Cleveland park with a toy pellet gun last November when someone called 911 on him, fearing that he was wielding a real firearm. The caller told the 911 dispatcher that he thought the gun was fake, but that information wasn’t relayed to police. Officers rolled onto the scene, and, within two seconds of getting out of his squad car, officer Timothy Loehmann shot Rice, fatally wounding the boy. Later, Loehmann said he thought Rice was carrying an actual gun, and that Rice reached — a disputed claim — for it.

On Monday, the Cuyahoga County prosecutor’s office released a report that essentially backed up Loehmann, arguing that the officer was right in believing that Rice posed a threat, and therefore right in using deadly force.

But the report, grand jury decision, and the intense media focus on both shows exactly what’s wrong with the dialogue surrounding police shootings. Instead of asking whether Loehmann’s actions were ethical, moral, or followed best practices, the conversation immediately shifts to whether his actions were legal. But legality doesn’t tell us anything about whether the shooting was preventable or acceptable — and that’s really what we should care about.

The Rice shooting may be legal, but it’s not acceptable

For a police officer to justify the use of deadly force, he has to reasonably perceive a threat. A threat does not actually have to be present, just the reasonable perception of it. (Reasonableness, in this case, was judged by a grand jury .) This legal standard is purposely loose; the intention is to give cops leeway to make split-second decisions to protect themselves and bystanders without the constant fear that they’ll be punished if they act.

In the case of Loehmann, it’s easy to see how he could reasonably perceive a threat: He thought Rice was older (around 20), and that Rice reached for a real gun, so he thought he needed to use deadly force to eliminate an immediate threat.

We should be asking how this could have been prevented

But the Rice case shows exactly what’s wrong with focusing too much on the legal issues. Within two seconds of getting out of the squad car, Loehmann shot Rice for allegedly clutching a pellet gun in an open-carry state , meaning people are allowed to openly carry real firearms in Ohio. Instead of asking how something like this happens or could be prevented, the issue has — as is common with police shooting cases — quickly shifted to what prosecutors will do and what grand juries will decide.

But we should be asking how this could have been prevented. Could police have parked further from the scene, and approached Rice more carefully? Could they have called for the boy to put down the gun from the squad car, instead of getting out immediately as the car pulled up and shooting Rice within two seconds? Could states and the federal government change legal standards for police officers’ use of force to encourage cops to act more cautiously before opening fire? These are fair questions, yet analyses focused on the current legal issues will always miss them.

“We have to get beyond what is legal and start focusing on what is preventable. Most are preventable,” Ronald Davis, a former police chief who heads the Justice Department’s Office of Community Oriented Policing Services, told the Washington Post . Police “need to stop chasing down suspects, hopping fences, and landing on top of someone with a gun,” he added. “When they do that, they have no choice but to shoot.”

Another way to put it, as criminal justice writer Radley Balko wrote in the Washington Post , is whether these shootings should be deemed acceptable by society even if they are legal:

Asking if a police shooting was legal tells us nothing about whether or not we should change the law. Asking whether or not it was within a police agency’s policies and procedures tells us nothing about the wisdom of those policies and procedures. Of course, both of those questions are important if your primary interest is in punishing police officers for these incidents. But while it can certainly be frustrating to see cops get a pass over and over again, even in incidents that seem particularly egregious, focusing on the individual officers involved hasn’t (and won’t) stopped people from getting killed.

So the concern isn’t really whether the Rice shooting was legal. According to a grand jury and a local prosecutor, it was. But that doesn’t mean we should move on. We could, instead, focus on changing the law, or forcing police departments to change their policies for how they approach these scenarios even if they know that they can legally get away with them. A child’s life could literally depend on it.

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Must-Read Reactions To Grand Jury Decision in Tamir Rice Case

Leah Donnella

Demonstrators block Public Square in Cleveland on November 25, 2014, during a protest over the police shooting of 12-year-old Tamir Rice. Tony Dejak/AP hide caption

Demonstrators block Public Square in Cleveland on November 25, 2014, during a protest over the police shooting of 12-year-old Tamir Rice.

On Monday, a grand jury decided not indict Timothy Loehmann, the Cleveland police officer who shot and killed 12-year-old Tamir Rice in November 2014. At time of the shooting, Rice was in a park, playing with an air gun he had borrowed from a friend. Loehmnann fired his weapon at the boy within two seconds of arriving on the scene.

It's now been over a year since Tamir's death, and for many supporters of the Rice family, the ensuing case has been a frustrating series of delays and injustices culminating in today's heartbreaking — but not surprising — decision. The victim's family had this to say in a statement :

"It has been clear for months now that the Cuyahoga County Prosecutor Timothy McGinty was abusing and manipulating the grand jury process to orchestrate a vote against indictment. "Even though video shows the police shooting Tamir in less than one second, Prosecutor McGinty hired so-called expert witnesses to try to exonerate the officers and tell the grand jury their conduct was reasonable and justified. "It is unheard of, and highly improper, for a prosecutor to hire 'experts' to try to exonerate the targets of a grand jury investigation. These are the sort of 'experts' we would expect the officer's criminal defense attorney to hire — not the prosecution."

Jamelle Bouie of Slate says that Tamir Rice's shooting and the subsequent acquittal of the officers involved are emblematic of a broader trend where police officers refuse to accept personal risk :

"What we see with Tamir Rice—and what we've seen in shootings across the country—is what happens when the officer's safety supercedes the obligation to accept risk. If "going home" is what matters—and risk is unacceptable—then the instant use of lethal force makes sense. It's the only thing that guarantees complete safety from harm. "It's also antithetical to the call to "serve and protect." But it's the new norm. And worse for any accountability, it sits flush with our broad sympathy with police in the courts of law and public opinion. So that, when police kill someone in this relentless drive to reduce risk, it's almost impossible to hold officers accountable, barring incredible circumstances. The public just accepts that this is what police had to do."

Aviva Shen at Think Progress detailed the timeline of the investigation back in October, echoing the belief, held by many, that prosecutor McGinty intentionally "prolonged the investigation and hindered the case." According to Shen, Tamir's case sits in stark contrast to similar ones:

"Tamir Rice's family has waited for a decision to move forward with the case for almost a full year, while other high profile police shootings around the country have reached decisions over indictments in a matter of days or weeks. McGinty has not yet presented the sheriff's investigation to the grand jury, which has been in his hands since June. With the release of the most recent report, McGinty has suggested it could take well over a year to decide to indict the officers, let alone to begin to try the case. "With each delay in the process, the chances for indictment and successful prosecution of the officers grow slimmer. Witnesses move away, memories fade, and evidence tends to disappear ."

Monday, when the decision was finally announced, Vox's German Lopez filled in some more context . His piece detailed the factors that led to the shooting of Tamir Rice, from the police's misperception of his size and age to the failure of the dispatcher to mention that his gun was probably a toy and to systemic problems with training in the Cleveland police department. Race, says Lopez, is also an important component:

"Black teens were 21 times as likely as white teens to be shot and killed by police between 2010 and 2012, according to a ProPublica analysis of the FBI data. ProPublica's Ryan Gabrielson, Ryann Grochowski Jones, and Eric Sagara reported: 'One way of appreciating that stark disparity, ProPublica's analysis shows, is to calculate how many more whites over those three years would have had to have been killed for them to have been at equal risk. The number is jarring — 185, more than one per week.' "The disparities appear to be even starker for unarmed suspects, according to an analysis of 2015 police killings by the Guardian . Racial minorities made up about 37.4 percent of the general population and 46.6 percent of armed and unarmed victims, but they made up 62.7 percent of unarmed people killed by police."

According to CNN , prosecutor McGinty expressed remorse over Tamir's death, calling it an "absolute tragedy," but was adamant about the legality of everything that had taken place:

"The state must be able to show that the officers acted outside the constitutional boundaries set forth by the Supreme Court of these United States. "Simply put: Given this perfect storm of human error, mistakes and communications by all involved that day, the evidence did not indicate criminal conduct by police."

But Radley Balko of the Washington Post said back in March that talking about legality can take us only so far . While what Loehmann did may have been legal in the strictest sense of the word, Balko writes,

"We shouldn't be asking if the police actions were legal or within department policy; we should be asking if they were necessary . Or if you'd like to use a word with a bit more urgency behind it, we should ask if they're acceptable. "Asking if a police shooting was legal tells us nothing about whether or not we should change the law. Asking whether or not it was within a police agency's policies and procedures tells us nothing about the wisdom of those policies and procedures. Of course, both of those questions are important if your primary interest is in punishing police officers for these incidents. But while it can certainly be frustrating to see cops get a pass over and over again, even in incidents that seem particularly egregious, focusing on the individual officers involved hasn't (and won't) stopped people from getting killed."

The U.S. Department of Justice says it will continue a separate investigation of Tamir's death :

"The Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice, the United States Attorney's Office and the Federal Bureau of Investigation have been monitoring the investigation that has been conducted regarding the death of Tamir Rice on Nov. 22, 2014. We will continue our independent review of this matter, assess all available materials and determine what actions are appropriate, given the strict burdens and requirements imposed by applicable federal civil rights laws. Additionally, the Department of Justice continues in its efforts to pursue ongoing and comprehensive reform pursuant to the consent decree in the federal, civil pattern and practice case filed before Chief Judge Solomon Oliver in the United States District Court for the Northern District of Ohio."

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The Legal Murder Of Tamir Rice

It should be increasingly clear that the police officer who killed 12-year-old Tamir Rice will not be tried; and should he be tried, he will not be convicted. The successful prosecution of a police officer for murder almost never happens . It probably won’t happen in the killing of Rice :

Two outside investigators looking into the death of Tamir Rice have concluded that a Cleveland police officer, Tim Loehmann, acted reasonably in deciding last year to shoot when he confronted the 12-year-old boy carrying what turned out to be a replica gun… “The question is not whether every officer would have reacted the same way,” Kimberly A. Crawford, the retired F.B.I. agent, wrote in her report , which noted that Officer Loehmann had no way of knowing Tamir’s gun was fake. “Rather, the relevant inquiry is whether a reasonable officer, confronting the exact same scenario under identical conditions could have concluded that deadly force was necessary.”

To be found not guilty of murder, a police officer need not prove that he used lethal violence against a threat, but that he reasonably believed himself to be threatened. Even in the case of Michael Slager, who shot a fleeing Walter Scott in the back, optimism for a conviction should be tempered :

Slager fired "because he felt threatened," and had no way to know Scott was unarmed because he had not had the chance to pat him down, his lawyer said. "He sees irrational behavior of a suspect, at that time," Savage said. "He sees a guy who's committed four felonies in the last minute and a half — violently resisting arrest, assaulting a police officer, robbing the police officer of his weapon Taser, and using that Taser in attempt to harm him. Four felonies in the last 30-45 seconds." After he took off running, Scott pivoted, the lawyer said, at which time the officer figured "the logic is that was going for a weapon."

At some point the discussion of police violence will have to move beyond the individual actions of officers to the level of policy. Convicting an officer of murder effectively requires an act of telepathy. As long as this is the standard, then the expectation of justice for a boy like Tamir Rice is little more than a kind of magical thinking.

Perhaps it is necessary to ask why we even have this standard in the first place. This is where my own questions begin: Is our tolerance for the lethal violence of the police rooted in the fact that lethal violence in our society is relatively common? Put differently, murder in America is much more common than in other developed countries . Is this how we have made our peace with that fact? Our world is, in some real sense, more dangerous. In recognition of this, have we basically said to the police, “Do what you will?” And in the case of Stand Your Ground , has this “Do what you will” ethic even extended to the citizenry? And if that is the case, then is there a line that can be drawn from Tamir Rice to Walter Scott to Sandy Hook to Trayvon Martin?

About the Author

Tamir Rice shooting: A breakdown of the events that led to the 12-year-old's death

Updated: Jan. 14, 2017, 12:26 a.m. |
Published: Jan. 13, 2017, 11:26 p.m.

Eric Heisig, cleveland.com

CLEVELAND, Ohio -- The decision Cleveland officials made to pursue punishment against city police officers in the shooting death of 12-year-old Tamir Rice will no doubt be just as divisive as other decisions made in the case over the past two years.

The city announced Friday that officials would pursue administrative charges against three officers, officers Timothy Loehmann, Frank Garmback and William Cunningham. It is also investigating a fourth unnamed police employee.

City internal investigators said they were able to find fault that met the burden of proof needed to impose discipline. At the same time, these same actions did not meet the burden of proof that Cuyahoga County prosecutors said they needed in their decision not to file criminal charges.

Chief Calvin Williams said hearings must be held before the charges are finalized and discipline is imposed.

Any discipline imposed will no doubt be appealed.

Regardless of the disciplinary charges, the events that led up to the 12-year-old's shooting on Nov. 22, 2014 have been picked apart endlessly by the public, lawyers and investigators.

Former Cuyahoga County Prosecutor Timothy J. McGinty called the shooting "a perfect storm of human error" at a December 2015 news conference.

Here is a breakdown of Loehmann's hiring, as well as what happened. Also included are the city's charging decisions and how the city addressed, directly or indirectly, addressed each issue to try to prevent such a shooting from happening again.

How Loehmann was hired

Loehmann applied to be a Cleveland police officer in March 2013, according to city charging documents released Friday. He was hired and started a year later. Police brass, however, did not properly vet Loehmann through publicly available information.

Loehmann now faces discipline for what the city said were omissions on his application. Internal investigators said he had an obligation to be forthcoming and completely truthful on his application, yet he omitted that he would have been fired from the Independence police department. The department allowed him to resign, the documents say.

Loehmann also omitted other agencies where he had applied that did not hire him, the charging documents say.

In the wake of Tamir's shooting, the city said it was committed to improve its hiring practices. At the time he was hired, the police department had no policies for vetting recruits.

Improving hiring practices is also something the city is required to do under a settlement it reached with the Justice Department.

How the call went out

A man called 911 to report that a "guy with a gun" is pointing it at people at Cudell Recreation Center.

The man was calm and told dispatcher Constance Hollinger that the person pointing the gun was "probably a juvenile" and that the gun is "probably fake."

Hollinger relayed the call to dispatcher Beth Mandl. She sent Garmback and his trainee, Loehmann, his trainee, to Cudell. They were on patrol and were the closest available officers to investigate. Garmback, behind the wheel of the cruiser, drove toward Cudell. Loehmann, who's been on the force for less than a year, sat in the passenger seat.

The problem was that dispatchers didn't tell Loehmann and Garmback that Tamir might be a child and that the gun might be fake. Mandl told Cuyahoga County Sheriff's Department investigators that she was not aware original caller said those things.

The city has not said whether either dispatcher was disciplined. Mandl resigned from the department in July.

How the officers pulled into Cudell

Garmback, a six-year veteran of the force at the time, drove over a curb at Cudell and to the the gazebo where Tamir had been sitting.

This put the cruiser within feet of the 12-year-old.

McGinty, when explaining the justification behind not charging Garmback, noted that the two officers thought they were dealing with a potential active shooter based on what information they had.

The city's internal investigators are seeking charges against Garmback for failing to employ proper tactics when driving his cruiser to what was reported as an armed suspect. He also violated department policy by not telling dispatchers when he arrived, the documents say.

Cunningham, who was working an off-duty shift at the recreation center, was not directly involved in the lead up to Tamir's shooting, but is facing discipline for working an off-duty shift without permission and lying to internal investigators.

How Loehmann got out and fired

As the cruiser stopped, Tamir reached into his right waistband and pulled out the replica gun, McGinty previously told cleveland.com.

Loehmann got out of the cruiser and fired his service weapon twice at close range. Loehmann said he shouted warnings to Tamir to drop his firearm, but the whole interaction lasted less than two seconds.

The city, since this shooting, has worked with the U.S. Justice Department and an independent monitor to re-draft how officers use force and try to de-escalate situations. While the new policies still leave officers a lot of discretion, it also says officers must take every step necessary to avoid using violence before using a weapon.

This could include slowing a situation down or moving to escape danger.

How the officers did (or did not) render Tamir medical attention

After Loehmann shot Tamir, neither he nor Garmback rendered first aid to the boy, who laid on the snow-covered grass. Four minutes later, an FBI agent, out with another Cleveland police officer investigating a robbery, showed up at Cudell and gave the boy medical attention until an ambulance arrived.

While the agent rendered medical attention, Loehmann and Garmback just stood there. The agent later told investigators that the officers "wanted to do something, but they didn't know what to do."

After the shooting, the city of Cleveland trained police officers on giving first aid and put kits in each of the city's cruisers.

If you would like to comment on this story, please visit Friday's crime and courts comments section .

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When I Think of Tamir Rice While Driving

Add to anthology.

in the backseat, my sons laugh & tussle, far from Tamir’s age, adorned with his complexion & cadence, & already warned

about toy pistols, though my rhetoric ain’t about fear, but dislike—about how guns have haunted me since I first gripped

a pistol; I think of Tamir, twice-blink & confront my weeping’s inadequacy, how some loss invents the geometry that baffles.

The Second Amendment—cold, cruel, a constitutional violence, a ruthless thing worrying me still, should be it predicts

the heft in my hand, arm sag, burdened by what I bear: My bare arms collaged with wings as if hope alone can bring

back a buried child. A child, a toy gun, a blue shield’s rapid rapid rabid shit. This is how misery sounds: my boys

playing in the backseat juxtaposed against a twelve-year-old’s murder playing in my head. My tongue cleaves to the roof

of my mouth, my right hand has forgotten. This is the brick & mortar of the America that murdered Tamir & may stalk the laughter

in my backseat. I am a father driving his Black sons to school & the death of a Black boy rides shotgun & this

could be a funeral procession, the death a silent thing in the air, unmentioned— because mentioning death invites taboo:

if you touch my sons the blood washed away from the concrete must, at some point, belong to you, & not just to you, to

the artifice of justice that is draped like a blue g-d around your shoulders, the badge that justifies the echo of the fired pistol; taboo:

the thing that says freedom is a murderer’s body mangled & disrupted by my constitutional rights come to burden, because the killer’s mind

refused the narrative of a brown child, his dignity, his right to breathe, his actual fucking existence, with all the crystalline brilliance I saw when

my boys first reached for me. This world best invite more than story of the children bleeding on crisp falls days, Tamir’s death must be more

than warning about recklessness & abandoned justice & white terror’s ghost—& this is why I hate it all, the protests & their counters,

the Civil Rights attorneys that stalk the bodies of the murdered, this dance of ours that reduces humanity to the dichotomy of the veil. We are

not permitted to articulate the reasons we might yearn to see a man die. A mind may abandon sanity. What if all I had stomach for was blood?

But history is no sieve & sanity is no elixir & I am bound to be haunted by the strength that lets Tamir’s father, mother, kinfolk resist

the temptation to turn everything they see into a grave & make home the series of cells that so many brothers already call their tomb.

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[untitled, p. 35].

Memorial Hoops

The day broke a record for cold, for us wanting To be anywhere but outside, & it was late May, the weekend we called Memorial. My mother Is a veteran, but that is a story for another time, & we were driving into the mother of rivers state, My youngest son, named after two men, one who Turned a trumpet into a prayer, the other who

Essay on Reentry

At two a.m., without enough spirits spilling into my liver to know to keep my mouth shut, my youngest learned of years I spent inside a box: a spell, a kind of incantation I was under; not whisky, but History: I robbed a man. This, months before he would drop bucket after bucket

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When I Think of Tamir Rice While Driving

in the backseat of my car are my own sons, still not yet Tamir’s age, already having heard me warn them against playing with toy pistols, though my rhetoric is always about what I don’t like, not what I fear, because sometimes I think of Tamir Rice & shed tears, the weeping all another insignificance, all another way to avoid saying what should be said: the Second Amendment is a ruthless one, the pomp & constitutional circumstance that says my arms should be heavy with the weight of a pistol when forced to confront death like this: a child, a hidden toy gun, an officer that fires before his heart beats twice. My two young sons play in the backseat while the video of Tamir dying plays in my head, & for everything I do know, the thing I don’t say is that this should not be the brick and mortar of poetry, the moment when a black father drives his black sons to school & the thing in the air is the death of a black boy that the father cannot mention, because to mention the death is to invite discussion of taboo: if you touch my sons the crimson that touches the concrete must belong, at some point, to you, the police officer who justifies the echo of the fired pistol; taboo: the thing that says that justice is a killer’s body mangled and disrupted by bullets because his mind would not accept the narrative of your child’s dignity, of his right to life, of his humanity, and the crystalline brilliance you saw when your boys first breathed; the narrative must invite more than the children bleeding on crisp fall days; & this is why I hate it all, the people around me, the black people who march, the white people who cheer, the other brown people, Latinos & Asians & all the colors of humanity that we erase in this American dance around death, as we are not permitted to articulate the reasons we might yearn to see a man die; there is so much that has to disappear for my mind not to abandon sanity: Tamir for instance, everything about him, even as his face, really and truly reminds me of my own, in the last photo I took before heading off to a cell, disappears, and all I have stomach for is blood, and there is a part of me that wishes that it would go away, the memories, & that I could abandon all talk of making it right & justice. But my mind is no sieve & sanity is no elixir & I am bound to be haunted by the strength that lets Tamir’s father, mother, kinfolk resist the temptation to turn everything they see into a grave & make home the series of cells that so many of my brothers already call their tomb. Source: Poetry (April 2016)

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In Tamir Rice Case, Many Errors by Cleveland Police, Then a Fatal One

By Shaila Dewan and Richard A. Oppel Jr.

Jan. 22, 2015

CLEVELAND — It began with a swap: one boy’s cellphone for another’s replica of a Colt pistol.

One of the boys went to play in a nearby park, striking poses with the lifelike, airsoft-style gun, which fired plastic pellets. He threw a snowball, settled down at a picnic table and flopped his head onto his arms in a perfect assertion of preteen ennui, a grainy security video shows.

Then, with the gun tucked away, he walked to the edge of the gazebo. He might have been wandering aimlessly, or he might have been attracted by the sight of a squad car barreling across the lawn.

Seconds later, the boy lay dying from a police officer’s bullet. “Shots fired, male down,” one of the officers in the car called across his radio. “Black male, maybe 20, black revolver, black handgun by him. Send E.M.S. this way, and a roadblock.”

But the boy, Tamir Rice , was only 12. Now, with the county sheriff’s office reviewing the shooting, interviews and recently released video and police records show how a series of miscommunications, tactical errors and institutional failures by the Cleveland police cascaded into one irreversible mistake.

And in death last November, Tamir joined Michael Brown, a teenager fatally shot by a police officer in Ferguson, Mo., and Eric Garner, a Staten Island man who died after being placed in a chokehold by an officer, as touchstones for protests of police violence against unarmed black people across the nation. Their names were chanted by demonstrators again on Monday in Martin Luther King Jr. Day marches.

Because of multiple layers in Cleveland’s 911 system, crucial information from the initial call about “a guy in here with a pistol” was never relayed to the responding police officers, including the caller’s caveats that the gun was “probably fake” and that the wielder was “probably a juvenile.”

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IMAGES

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COMMENTS

Tamir Rice
Tamir Rice. Tamir Rice was an innocent 12-year-old child who was killed on November 22, 2014, by a white police officer in Cleveland, Ohio. Two officers responded to a police dispatch call reporting that there was a male pointing a pistol at random people in the park. The 911 caller explicitly stated at the beginning and the middle of the call ...
The case of Tamir Rice: race, self-defense, and the objective
By Emmanuela Jean-Etienne Associate Editor, Vol. 21. On a cold November afternoon in Cleveland, twelve-year-old Tamir Rice sat alone at a gazebo outside the Cudell Recreation Center, a place he frequented daily. In his hand was an airsoft pistol and, according to the witness who would later call 9-1-1, he was pointing it at cars and people as they passed by.
Emmett Till and Tamir Rice, Sons of the Great Migration
On the afternoon of Nov. 22, 2014, a Saturday, she let Tamir and his sister Tajai go to the recreation center by the park across the street before dinner. She was starting the lasagna when there ...
Tamir Elijah Rice (2002-2014)
The shooting death of twelve-year-old Tamir Rice in 2014 brought increased attention to the national debate on interactions between police officers and African Americans. Tamir Elijah Rice was born to Samaria Rice and Leonard Warner on June 15, 2002, in Cleveland, Ohio. At times, Rice's family life was turbulent as Warner was convicted of ...
Tamir Rice and the Color of Fear
On Monday, two officers were cleared of any criminal wrongdoing for killing Tamir Rice, a 12-year-old who had been playing in a Cleveland park with a toy gun. A 911 caller reported that Rice was ...
The Tamir Rice Story: How to Make a Police Shooting Disappear
A little after three o'clock, a guy with a tall-boy showed up in the park to wait for a 3:30 bus downtown. He didn't know Tamir. He saw a baby-faced guy, ﬁve feet seven, almost 200 pounds ...
How the Police and Legal Systems Failed Tamir Rice
The officers pulled up onto the grass no more than a few feet away from the suspect. Within two seconds of stopping their vehicle, Loehmann shot and killed 12-year-old Tamir Rice. Rice had been tried, convicted and executed in just two seconds. He was, in the worst possible way, held "accountable" for pointing a "probably fake" gun at ...
What Everyone Should Know About The Police Killing Of Tamir Rice (2002
Here are seven facts that everyone should know about the case. 1. The officer fatally shot Tamir Rice less than 2 seconds after exiting his police car. This is according to the official report from the prosecutor: "Officer Loehman discharged his firearm within two seconds of exiting the car. Officer Loehmann fired two shots, one of which hit ...
Tamir Rice's Family's Letter to DOJ
The family of Tamir Rice, a 12-year-old boy who was shot and killed in 2014 by the Cleveland police, has asked Attorney General Merrick B. Garland to reopen the Justice Department's ...
For many, ruling in Tamir Rice case highlights need for reform
McGinty had told the grand jury reviewing the Tamir Rice case that he didn't believe it was possible to convict Loehmann. This statement came more than a year after the shooting, which occurred on Nov. 22, 2014, and only after the release of enhanced surveillance video. Based on this video, McGinty said it was "indisputable" that Rice was ...
Grand jury says police shooting of Tamir Rice was legally ...
Tamir Rice was playing at a Cleveland park with a toy pellet gun last November when someone called 911 on him, fearing that he was wielding a real firearm. The caller told the 911 dispatcher that ...
Must-Read Reactions To Grand Jury Decision in Tamir Rice Case
Tony Dejak/AP. On Monday, a grand jury decided not indict Timothy Loehmann, the Cleveland police officer who shot and killed 12-year-old Tamir Rice in November 2014. At time of the shooting, Rice ...
'My Memories of Tamir Rice': A Personal Essay
To me, Tamir Rice is not a news item or a conversation starter. He was an unforgettable student I taught and cared for during a brief period in time. He was a kid who struggled with being moved ...
The Legal Murder Of Tamir Rice
The successful prosecution of a police officer for murder almost never happens. It probably won't happen in the killing of Rice: Two outside investigators looking into the death of Tamir Rice ...
Killing of Tamir Rice
Tamir Elijah Rice (June 25, 2002 - November 23, 2014) was born in Cleveland, Ohio, on June 25, 2002, to Samaria Rice and Leonard Warner. [24] [25] His family described him as athletic, excelling at various sports—including football, basketball, swimming and soccer—and often competing with kids older than him.At age 12, Rice stood 5'7" and weighed 195 lbs. [26] He was involved in arts ...
A breakdown of the events that led to the Tamir Rice's death
Regardless of the disciplinary charges, the events that led up to the 12-year-old's shooting on Nov. 22, 2014 have been picked apart endlessly by the public, lawyers and investigators. Former ...
Justice Dept. Is Said to Quietly Quash Inquiry Into Tamir Rice Killing
Oct. 29, 2020. WASHINGTON — The Justice Department decided more than a year ago to effectively shut down its civil-rights investigation into the high-profile killing of Tamir Rice, a 12-year-old ...
When I Think of Tamir Rice While Driving
in the backseat, my sons laugh & tussle, far from Tamir's age, adorned with his complexion & cadence, & already warned about toy pistols, though my rhetoric ain't about fear, but dislike—about how guns have haunted me since I first gripped. a pistol; I think of Tamir, twice-blink & confront my weeping's inadequacy, how some loss invents the geometry that baffles.
Tamir Rice Essay
Tamir Rice Essay. Decent Essays. 510 Words. 3 Pages. Open Document. I was on my laptop at my house when I watched Tamir Rice get shot in the chest by a police officer. I clicked on the article, and I remember thinking that maybe it was an accidental firing. Tamir was shot at close range because the officers at the scene thought he had a gun.
2 Cleveland Police Officers Avoid Federal Charges in Killing of Tamir Rice
Ty Wright for The New York Times. Two Cleveland police officers will avoid federal criminal charges for their role in the killing of Tamir Rice, a 12-year-old Black boy who had been carrying a ...
When I Think of Tamir Rice While Driving
When I Think of Tamir Rice While Driving. By Reginald Dwayne Betts. in the backseat of my car are my own sons, still not yet Tamir's age, already having heard. me warn them against playing with toy pistols, though my rhetoric is always about what I don't. like, not what I fear, because sometimes. I think of Tamir Rice & shed tears, the weeping.
In Tamir Rice Case, Many Errors by Cleveland Police, Then a Fatal One
Samaria Rice and her daughter Tajai, left, in Cleveland near where Ms. Rice's son Tamir, 12, was killed by a police officer. Michael F. McElroy for The New York Times. By Shaila Dewan and ...

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The Tamir Rice Story: How to Make a Police Shooting Disappear

How the Police and Legal Systems Failed Tamir Rice

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1. The officer fatally shot Tamir Rice less than 2 seconds after exiting his police car.

2. A state judge ruled there was probable cause to charge the officer who killed Tamir Rice with murder.

3. The officer who fatally shot Tamir Rice was deemed “unfit for duty” at the last police department where he worked.

4. Neither officer involved in the shooting administered first aid to Rice after he was shot.

5. The officers refused to testify but the prosecutor submitted their written statements to the jury.

6. The prosecutor commissioned reports from two “experts” with a history of sympathy toward police, then released them to the media.

7. Explaining his decision not to press for an indictment, the prosecutor said “We don’t second-guess police officers.”

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For many, ruling in Tamir Rice case highlights need for reform

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Grand jury says police shooting of Tamir Rice was legally justified. That's the problem.

The Rice shooting may be legal, but it’s not acceptable

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