Jeb Bush on Tamir Rice: “The process worked”

Cleveland police will review from start to finish the fatal shooting of 12-year-old Tamir Rice to determine if the two officers involved or others should face disciplinary action over the November 2014 incident, officials said on Tuesday.

The case of Tamir Rice, the 12-year-old boy who was shot dead by two Cleveland cops for brandishing a toy gun, is a case where the jury of public opinion may have gotten it wrong.

The Times argued Rice “had the misfortune of being black in a poor area of Cleveland, where the police have historically behaved as an occupying force that shoots first and asks questions later”.

Up to 100 protesters marched around downtown Cleveland Tuesday afternoon chanting for justice in the case of Tamir Rice, who was shot by police in 2014.

McGinty, a Democrat, said a series of errors that led to the shooting did not amount to criminal conduct by Officer Timothy Loehmann or his partner, Frank Garmback. In a statement to the grand jury Loehmann said he yelled for Rice to show his hands and saw him pull a gun from his waistband before the officer fired.

Cuyahoga (ky-uh-HOH’-guh) County prosecutor Tim McGinty says his office was required ethically to tell the grand jury they didn’t think a conviction was likely.

Mayor Frank Jackson said that now that the criminal process has concluded, an administrative review would no begin. Knowledge of these details, however, did not sway the opinions of the grand jury or the prosecutor.

The toy gun lacked an orange safety tip and Mr McGinty urged toy manufacturers to stop making replicas that look like real guns. When Cleveland police officers got the call, they already had the playbook: in their minds this was an armed and risky black man. And you know what happens to armed and unsafe black men. And it was not until later they realized he was a 12-year-old boy, they said.

The family of Tamir blasted McGinty in a statement, saying it was “saddened and disappointed… but not surprised” by the grand jury decision.

Gov. John Kasich called Tamir’s death a “heartbreaking tragedy”.

Mr McGinty, who announced the grand jury’s decision on Monday, blamed the emergency services dispatcher for not relaying that information to police. In a time in which a non-indictment who have killed an unarmed black child is business as usual, we mourn for Tamir, and for all of the black people who have been killed by the police without justice. “But it was not, by the law that binds us, a crime”.

According to data compiled by an activist group, United States police have killed 1,152 people as of December 15 of this year, with the largest police departments disproportionately killing at least 321 African Americans.