Officers in Tamir Rice Shooting to Face a New Administrative Review

“It’s incredibly hard for the government to prove civil rights violations in police shootings because you have to prove that an officer meant to kill someone”, Angel Harris, an assistant counsel for the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, told Mic.

Rice’s size has been a point of contention in this case – the 12-year-old was large for his age, standing at 5-foot-7 and weighing about 175 lbs. But the caller also said it could be a juvenile and the gun might be a fake. “I doubt a private citizen would go unindicted if they shot a boy with a toy pistol one second after encountering him”.

“The most important thing that we all need to understand, this issue is bigger than LeBron”, he said.

The grand jury had been hearing evidence and testimony since mid-October.

If the old saying is true – any good prosecutor can indict a ham sandwich – so is the reverse. But he told reporters that he is also closely monitoring the response to the Rice decision and has been in frequent contact with state and local law enforcement officials, state lawmakers representing Cleveland, and religious leaders. And there is good reason for that. Anti-police brutality and human rights activists gathered at Washington Square Park and held a rally before marching across Brooklyn bridge and then storming the Atlantic Terminal mall.

The cops didn’t have all the information they should have been given.

Tamir was holding a replica of a.45-calibre handgun that fires plastic pellets and is sold with an orange tip on it. The gun Tamir held did not have an orange tip.

It comes at a time when the deaths of black men at the hands of police have sparked a national debate.

American cities have burned as our society grapples with the unpleasant outcomes of bad situations.

Tamir was carrying what turned out to be a pellet gun when Loehmann shot and killed the boy within two seconds of emerging from his police cruiser in November 2014.

The decision came after a Cuyahoga County investigation that lasted more than one year.

Beyond the expected protests, what’s next in a case that has prompted calls for greater scrutiny of the use of lethal force by the police?

Much of the controversy centers around whether celebrities have a responsibility to undertake social justice endeavors and, in this case, take sides after a decision by a jury. And there remain too many unanswered questions about the process that led to this grand jury’s decision not to indict Timothy Loehmann, the officer who fatally shot Tamir.

“Police are mostly criticized for not responding”, Hilow said. Video of the stop shows that when Bland declined to extinguish her cigarette, Encinia ordered her out of her auto, grabbed her, threatened her with a stun gun, handcuffed her, and tackled her. He said she had only herself to blame for provoking him by failing to display the meek subservience he expected. Because in the community of Cleveland, we have had great gains made, economically, not for everybody, but for a lot of people.