Prosecutor Blames Tamir Rice for getting shot

[_Kevin Graham]

Un.

Frickin.

Believable.


Here is the video of an unarmed 12 year old black kid being gunned down by a white cop.


I can't help but think of the dozens and dozens of times white men proudly tote their huge assault weapons around town just daring someone to mess with them, and cops don't even stop or question their intentions because, well, they have rights. The same doesn't apply to black people. The same story, just a different chapter. It will be interesting to see how subgenius, ajax and faqs defend the white cop on this one. You can clearly see they flew it and within a split second gunned him down before he had any idea what was going on.

How A Prosecutor Managed To Blame A 12-Year-Old For Getting Killed By A Cop

Although a grand jury declined to indict the two Cleveland police officers involved in the shooting of 12-year-old Tamir Rice, Cuyahoga County Prosecutor Timothy McGinty wasn’t exactly acting like a someone who had suffered a major legal failure.

At a press conference on Monday, McGinty made no secret of the fact that he agreed with the decision, admitting that he had recommended to the grand jury that it not indict officers Timothy Loehmann and Frank Garmback.

The prosecutor had already attempted to convince the grand jury not to indict the men, commissioning expert reports that called their guilt into question and then leaking those reports to the media. As The Huffington Post’s Cristian Farias wrote, McGinty “turned the grand jury in the Tamir Rice case into his plaything.”

But on Monday, he didn't merely suggest that the police officers' use of force against Rice was justified. He selectively used information to excuse and defend their actions, and implicitly blamed the unarmed African-American boy who was killed -- something that is all too common in police killings.

Here are some of McGinty’s most questionable claims and observations:

Timothy Loehmann was a ‘reasonable’ police officer.

McGinty characterized Timothy Loehmann -- who shot Rice within seconds of arriving on the scene -- as a “reasonable” police officer. The grand jury also declined to indict Frank Garmback, who drove Loehmann in the police cruiser.
“The Supreme Court instructs to judge an officer by what he or she knew at the moment, not by what was learned later,” McGinty said. “We are instructed to ask what a reasonable police officer, with the knowledge he had, would do in this particular situation.”

But McGinty failed to explain that Loehmann's perception of what was "reasonable" may have been questionable.
After five months on the job, Loehmann quit the police force of the Cleveland suburb of Independence, Ohio, in December 2012, days after a deputy police chief recommended his dismissal. The deputy police chief based his recommendation on a firearms instructor’s report, obtained by NBC News, that Loehmann was experiencing an “emotional meltdown” that made his facility with a handgun “dismal.”

“They put a police officer in this situation who had a history of mental health problems,” said Michael Benza, a criminal law professor at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland. “It may not have been ‘reasonable’ for him to shoot given his mental issues.”

Tamir Rice was big and scary.

McGinty suggested that 12-year-old Rice was threatening, though he conceded that the boy may have meant to explain that his gun was fake just before he was killed. According to the prosecutor, Rice looked bigger than most children his age and had already been warned that his gun might frighten people.

“If we put ourselves in the victim’s shoes, as prosecutors and detectives try to do, it is likely that Tamir, whose size made him look much older and who had been warned that his pellet gun might get him into trouble that day, either intended to hand it over to the officers or show them it wasn’t a real gun,” McGinty said.

While Rice’s appearance and the possibility that someone had warned him not to carry a toy gun may have been enough for a grand jury to determine that the officers' actions were justified, this does not mean that shooting him was unavoidable.

Steve Martin, an expert on the use of force in corrections settings, called the facts McGinty mentioned “kind of tangential.”
“If you come upon a situation where there is risk of harm, the question is how imminent is the threat,” Martin said. “That controls whether you can take time and distance to assess -- time to put distance between yourself and the subject" to assess whether the threat requires immediate action.

Driving up so close to Rice was likely a “poor tactical decision” by Garmback, the officer at the wheel, according to a former senior police official in another city who requested anonymity in order to comment freely, given the sensitivity of the case. The official currently helps a city government manage claims of excessive force or other wrongdoing by police officers.

“That was a tactical decision that required the man to make a much more rapid decision,” he said. “It looks like they could have stopped 100 or 200 yards away and taken cover.”

Still, McGinty and the grand jury evaluating the case believed the cops had a “reasonable belief” that Rice posed an immediate danger, according to the prosecutor.

That was likely all officers needed to avoid indictment, since the legal threshold for indicting officers for use of force in the line of duty is incredibly high and a unique grand jury process already tilted in the cops’ favor.

By taking the time to mention Rice’s size and possibly unwise decision to carry a toy gun, McGinty both implied that Rice had it coming and reinforced a common perception that black boys seem older and more menacing.

Psychologists have found that female U.S. college students who were shown photos of boys of different races viewed African-American boys ages 10 and older as less innocent than their white peers. The young women also estimated that the boys were 4.5 years older on average than they actually were.

Officers were on edge because other cops were killed nearby.

McGinty also mentioned that the fear of death might have weighed more heavily on Loehmann and Garmback since police officers had been killed previously near the park where Loehmann shot Rice.

“The police were prepared to face a possible active shooter in a neighborhood with a history of violence,” McGinty said. “There are, in fact, memorials to slain Cleveland police officers in that very park, a short distance away, and both had been shot to death in the line of duty.”

It's not exactly clear why McGinty would note this, but he appears to be suggesting that the two previous shootings -- dating back to 2006 and 1996, respectively -- were fresh in the Loehmann and Garmback's minds when they approached Rice.

Regardless, these details should have little bearing on whether Loehmann's decision to shoot Rice was justified, and whether Garmback miscalculated by pulling up so close to the boy.

Police officers routinely work in neighborhoods where violence is common. The fact that two officers had been killed many years earlier near the park where they encountered Rice should not have affected how they viewed the 12-year-old.
“One of the contradictions that has come out in this case is that the prosecutors will say, ‘We are only evaluating conduct at the moment of the shooting,’ and then immediately step back and talk about the toy gun and everything else,” said Benza, who has worked a public defense attorney in Ohio.

“I am not sure where in Cleveland is not a high-crime area,” he added. “Those are the places where police are active.”

Rice could have been McGinty’s son or grandson.

McGinty did his best to emphasize that the officers’ lack of criminal culpability before the law did not diminish the tragedy of Rice’s death. He even said it touched him personally.

“The outcome will not cheer anyone, nor should it,” McGinty said. “Every time I think about this case, I cannot help but feel that the victim could have been my own son or grandson.”

There is just one problem with that: McGinty is white and, as far as we know, does not have any black children or grandchildren.

“It would have been a completely different interaction if it had been his son or grandson, and that is because of race,” Benza said. “We have allowed race to influence whether an officer believes he or she is threatened. One of the factors officers will use in assessing a threat is the race of the person they are dealing with.”

McGinty himself inadvertently underscored the way race can creep into officers’ decision-making when he suggested that the crime rate in the neighborhood where Rice was killed had made it more reasonable for the cops to fear him.

Benza argues that in Ohio, where residents with a permit are allowed to carry guns in the open, it's especially apparent that gun owners are treated differently, depending on their race. People sometimes call the police when they see white people walking down the street with assault-style rifles, yet they are rarely treated as active shooters the way Rice was.
“When [police] go into a neighborhood where there is a perception of danger and they see a big black guy that matches the description of a guy with a gun, they are going to act very differently than if they see a white guy with a gun in the suburbs,” Benza concluded.

[_ludwigm]

A society governed by gunslingers.

[_Kevin Graham]

I'm shocked none of the usual suspects have commented.

I guess there really is no plausible defense this time.

Meanwhile, these duchebags in Ohio are carrying REAL guns in public and nary a cop bothers them, let alone gun them down. Which makes me wonder, if the cop thought Tamir Rice was an adult and carrying a gun isn't against the law in Ohio, then what exact law did Rice break, aside from being black?

[_ajax18]

if the cop thought Tamir Rice was an adult

Why would the policeman have to think he was an adult? Do you think minors never shoot people or police officers? They may not suffer the same penalties for their actions as adults but their victims are just as dead.

[_Kevin Graham]

Why would the policeman have to think he was an adult? Do you think minors never shoot people or police officers? They may not suffer the same penalties for their actions as adults but their victims are just as dead.

The cop said he didn't know Tamir Rice was a minor. So he thought he was an adult. Which is utter BS and doesn't matter anyway. The question, which you of course dodged, is what law did he break? He was just playing around with a toy gun, but even if he were playing around with a real gun, thanks to the NRA back gun nuts on the Right, that's not against the law either. So again, why justification is there for gunning down this black child who had done absolutely NOTHING wrong? White morons tote their guns around and intimidate people of color all the time and cops do nothing about it. This kid was just goofing off in the park minding his own business and within a split second, he's gunned down. Why? Because he's black, that's why.

[_MissTish]

The Tamir Rice Shooting Reveals the Darkness at the Heart of Open Carry Laws
Ohio's law clearly does not apply to everyone.


I have to admit that it took a day before I could sit down and write about the thoroughgoing bag-job that was the official investigation into the summary execution-by-cop of Tamir Rice, a 12-year old who apparently had the misfortune of having a growth spurt in the fevered mind of one Officer Timothy Loehmann, who found it necessary to shoot Rice down before he could grow any bigger and more threatening. When will African American children learn not to grow so suddenly into monsters in the minds of our brave folks in blue? Personally, I blame the rap music.

"It is likely that Tamir, whose size made him look much older and who had been warned his pellet gun might get him into trouble that day, either intended to hand it over to the officers or show them it wasn't a real gun," McGinty said. "But there was no way for the officers to know that, because they saw the events rapidly unfolding in front of them from a very different perspective." It was "reasonable" to believe the officer who killed the boy believed Tamir was a threat, the prosecutor said, adding that the toy gun looked real.

He really is quite the hack, this McGinty. First, he pollutes the process by questioning the motives of Rice's grieving family. Then, by several accounts, he does his best imitation of Eddie Cicotte before the grand jury. Then, he comes out, his face as mournful as old purple and about as sincere as your average swampland entrepreneur, and talks about what a "perfect storm" of tragedy this whole case was. Like I said, he really is quite the hack, and I expect a run for Congress any day now.

And then there's Loehmann, the innocent victim of Tamir Rice's unexpected growth spurt. He lost his previous job as a cop in a tiny Cleveland suburb because he couldn't hit a bull in the ass with a bass fiddle on the firing range, and also because he was something of a basket case. Naturally, the Cleveland P.D. didn't bother to check Loehmann's service record before hiring him. Luckily, Rice, who was 5'7" and 175 pounds, managed to become 6'6", 250 right there before Loehmann's eyes. That made him easier to hit, I guess.

Is there any real point in being angry any more? Is there any real point even to be surprised? There certainly is no point in emphasizing the damn irony that Ohio is an "open carry" state so, even if the cops assumed Rice was 18, and they also assumed his gun was real, they had no cause even to stop him, let alone open fire. Listen to the spiel that Wayne LaPierre unspools every time he's in a room with more than four people listening: arm yourselves, because the world is a hellscape of violent Others who are coming for you and your children. At its heart, open carry is about open season on the people who scare you. It's certainly not about an absolute Second Amendment right that applies to black people as well as white. Open carry is about You and the Others, and so is the training of our modern, militarized police forces. If only Tamir Rice had not been born with that congenital ability to become huge and threatening the way he did in the mind of Timothy Loehmann. If only…


http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/po ... pen-carry/

[_subgenius]

The liberal ring in KG's nose is getting bigger. ..wonder how much money they have conned out of him? Especially given his position on "money in politics"

[_ldsfaqs]

I'm shocked none of the usual suspects have commented.

I guess there really is no plausible defense this time.

Meanwhile, these duchebags in Ohio are carrying REAL guns in public and nary a cop bothers them, let alone gun them down. Which makes me wonder, if the cop thought Tamir Rice was an adult and carrying a gun isn't against the law in Ohio, then what exact law did Rice break, aside from being black?

The utter ignorance of Kevin G. is astounding....

1. It sounds like a black woman called the Police? Is she racist Kevin?

2. It's like you didn't even watch the video.

a. the person reporting him states a young man was walking around pointing a gun at people.
b. if you watched the video, you would clearly see what appears to be the boy pointing the gun at police
c. the police man close to him diving to the ground and then apparently shooting the young man. So, either the boy aimed the gun at the police, or he aimed it and shot at the police with the BB Gun. Remember, BB guns "can" be dangerous, but more so, you don't know you're being shot with a BB gun if you're having a gun pointed at you and you have to react in milliseconds to protect yourself.

3. Kevin G. entirely ignores the FACT that the Grand Jury found no fault by the officer.

Tell me Kevin G..... If someone points a gun at you, would you fear for your life?
What in your warped liberal brain somehow thinks a Cop doesn't have the right to defend himself when pulling up on someone with a gun and they raise the gun at the cop? Remember, NOBODY knew it was a BB gun..... Do you really in your warped brain don't think a person has the right to defend themselves when what appears to be a leathal weapon is pointed at them, AND the person in question was walking all over the park pointing it at people?

Again Kevin.... Tells us how YOU wouldn't want to defend yourself if a gun is pointed at you, and you have ZERO knowledge that it was a BB gun?
Remember, all you know is a gun being pointed at you.... How do you know it's not a real gun? What happens during the times when it IS a real gun? Do you just sit there and DIE, because in your little warped mind it "might" in 1 in 1,000 times a gun is pointed at someone be in fact a BB Gun? Thus, that's like 999 times in which it's a REAL GUN..... yet in your warped mind, the cop shouldn't have shot the young man???

Kevin G., you demonstrate clearly as anyone how mentally unstable you liberals are.

The boy (which they thought was a man by the way as the recording shows) was waving a gun around and pointing it at people, and THEN he pointed it at Police. When are you Liberals going to stop placing "blame" where it actually belongs? The boy shouldn't have aimed a gun at people AND especially at Police. HE killed himself.... not the police. The police did EXACTLY what they reasonably could do in the situation with the knowledge they had.

Woe unto those who call good evil and evil good.

[_Kevin Graham]

What the hell is wrong with you? The person who made the 911 call is not a black person, it sounds very much like an old white male. The only other black person involved is the 911 operator, and of course, being the racist that you are, you're going to blame her instead of the racist moron who made the call and the racist cop who shot the boy for no reason. You have to be a complete idiot to buy into this argument that the boy "pulled" his gun on him and the cop was fearing for his life when the video clearly shows that he had his weapon drawn and fired even before the car came to a complete stop. The kid had no damned clue what was going on.

Oh, and how do you explain the fact that the cops didn't even try to give the boy first aid after they realized he was no threat and that he had a toy gun?

The fact is white people pull guns on cops and aim at them and are not killed or even shot at. Cliven Bundy and his little militia comes to mind. This was pretty recent too and these men were aiming their guns at law enforcement officers and no one did a thing about it. How come? Because they were white. This crap happens so often it is ridiculous.

[_MissTish]

2. It's like you didn't even watch the video.

Well, it like somebody sure didn't anyway.

Woe unto those that call good evil blah blah blah....and woe unto those that try to justify the killing of a 12 year old child, especially those who do it just so they can do their usual rant about 'liberals'.