Cleveland Officers Won’t Be Charged in Tamir Rice’s Killing

This comes as Chicago police have two more officers on paid leave as the department investigates the fatal shooting of two people. one the police already admit was an accident. A lawyer for his partner, patrolman Frank Garmback, called the shooting a “tragic incident” but said it was clear the officers “acted within the bounds of the law”. McGinty said that Loehmann had “reason to fear for his life”, and that the police radio personnel’s “errors were a substantial contributing factor” to Rice’s death.

Two outside reviews by an Federal Bureau of Investigation agent and a Denver prosecutor conducted at McGinty’s request concluded in October that Loehmann was justified in killing Tamir.

The Cuyahoga County grand jury declined to indict the Cleveland police officers in the Tamir Rice case.

Fox News contributor Rod Wheeler reminded Payne that the officer who shot Rice “should not have even been on the force” because of earlier disciplinary problems.

While the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Cleveland has said it will review the circumstances of the shooting, the legal hurdles to prosecuting a civil rights case are considered especially high. And it was not until later that they realized he was a 12-year-old boy, they said.

Rice was playing with a pellet gun when someone called police, saying the gun might not be real, but dispatchers didn’t pass along that information.

“Prosecutors continue to wield unchecked authority over Black communities”, Robinson said in the statement.

In a statement issued later he added, “We all lose, however, if we give in to anger and frustration and let it divide us”. “It is unheard of, and highly improper, for a prosecutor to hire “experts” to try to exonerate the targets of a grand jury investigation”.

Protests were held on Monday in several cities, including Cleveland and New York City, according to media reports.

In an undated handout photo, Tamir Rice, a 12-year-old boy who died on November 23, 2014, a day after an officer shot him outside a recreation center. In fact, victim’s family has claimed that they might have been “disappointed” by the outcome but they were not “surprised”. “The prosecutor is covering up his own mishandling of the process”. When Rice saw the police officers, he pulled up the replica gun and the officers had to fire to defend themselves and protect visitors in the park. And he said Rice was big for his age – 5 feet 7 and 175 pounds, with a men’s XL jacket and size-36 trousers – and could have easily passed for someone much older. However, the alleged gun that Tamir was holding turned out to be a toy.

Typically a warning label on the packaging would indicate that removing the orange tip of the gun “is risky, may cause confusion, may be mistaken to be a real firearm by law enforcement officers of others and may be a crime”.

But the boy’s family has filed a civil lawsuit over his death in November 2014, amid anger over a number of killings of black citizens by police officers across the United States.

Assistant prosecutor Matthew Meyer said CCTV footage showed the boy repeatedly drawing the gun from his waistband and putting it back before the officers arrived. He was also seen pointing the gun at other children.

The Rice shooting came just days before a grand jury opted not to indict a white police officer who fatally shot unarmed black teenager Michael Brown in the St Louis, Missouri, suburb of Ferguson in August 2014.