Cleveland officers who fatally shot Tamir Rice won’t be indicted

Tamir Rice has now become another victim of police brutality that won’t get a fair chance.

Today, the grand jury decided not to indict the two Cleveland officers who shot and killed 12-year-old Tamir Rice.

“Simply put, given this perfect storm of human error, mistakes and miscommunications by all involved that day, the evidence did not indicate criminal conduct by police,” Cuyahoga County prosecutor Tim McGinty told reporters.

Since October, the grand jury has been hearing testimony about the fatal shooting of Rice that happened last year.

Tamir Rice was playing with an air gun when he was fatally shot.

Police received a phone call about a person playing in the park in what seemed to be a toy gun.

A video that captured the incident showed when officers arrived on the scene, they fired within seconds at 12-year-old Tamir Rice.

McGinty stated that a recent enhancement of surveillance video was “perhaps the most critical piece of evidence.”

He said that because of that new enhancement, “it is now indisputable that Tamir was drawing his gun from his waist as the police car slid toward him and Officer Loehmann exited the car.”

Here’s more from McGinty:

“At the point where they suddenly came together, both Tamir and the rookie officer were no doubt frightened. 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 that it wasn’t a real gun. But there was no way for the Cleveland officers to know that, because they saw the events unfolding in front of them from a very different perspective.”

 

The incident took more than a year to start an investigation, making the Rice family growing frustrated on receiving justice.

Subodh Chandra, a lawyer representing the Rice family in a civil lawsuit, had told AP ahead of the decision that he didn’t expect the officers to be indicted.

“This is apparently how long it takes to engineer denying justice to a family when the video of the incident clearly illustrates probable cause to charge the officer,” he had said.