Grand jury declines to indict Cleveland officer in Tamir Rice shooting

Rice was holding a replica handgun when Officer Timothy Loehmann shot him within seconds of reaching the park in a squad auto driven by his partner, Frank Garmback.

Cuyahoga county prosecutor Timothy McGinty said Rice’s size “made him look older” and that he dressed exactly like a man who reportedly pointed a gun at people outside the Cudell Recreation Center on the same day.

Surveillance video showed Rice was fatally shot within seconds of the patrol auto arriving on the scene as he began to pull the toy gun out of his waistband. It was missing the orange tip that is supposed to show that it is not a real weapon. Rather than “a flawless storm of human error” as Cuyahoga County Prosecutor Timothy McGinty described this tragedy, Rice’s death and the lack of accountability for it are a result of racial profiling, incompetent 911 services, over-zealous and reckless policing practices, and a systemic bias in favor of police.

However, the Tamir Rice case follows a pattern repeated across the country, in which grand juries are converted into de facto secret trials, with no cross-examination and no representation for the victims, in order to whitewash police killings. “But this entire process was a charade”, said Rice’s mother, Samaria Rice, in a statement Monday evening.

The presence of demonstrators paled in comparison to the thousands that convened in nearby Union Square in December 2014 to protest a Missouri grand jury decision not to indict former Ferguson police officer Darren Wilson for the shooting death of Michael Brown. It accused the prosecutor of “abusing and manipulating the grand jury process to orchestrate a vote against indictment”.

But echoing the prosecutor, the family urged anyone disappointed in the grand jury decision to express that “peacefully and democratically”.

Rice was shot by a Cleveland Police officer in November of previous year after a 911 call informed Cleveland police that an individual was in a west side park with a gun or possibly a toy.

But it later turned out that Tamir was only playing with an air-soft gun that he borrowed from a friend.

The Justice Department and FBI have been monitoring the investigation and will continue an independent review of Rice’s death, a spokesman said.

A committee made up of police and private citizens will look at the sheriff, prosecutor, and grand jury’s investigations and present their findings to Police Chief Calvin Williams.

Cleveland’s reputation has suffered because of some well-publicized police shootings, including the killings of two unarmed black people in a 137-shot barrage of police gunfire at the end of a 2012 auto chase.

Public outcry has been furious since a dashcam video was released last month showing the veteran officer shooting McDonald 16 times. McGinty said the city has taken steps to prevent this kind of shooting from happening again. Officer Garmback was also spared any charges. These are the sort of “experts” we would expect the officer’s criminal-defense attorney to hire-not the prosecutor. He said he wasn’t surprised by the grand jury decision. His family insists that Rice’s hands were in his pockets when police shot him.

As protesters took to the streets of Cleveland, Twitter exploded with reaction.

In a statement issued not long after the prosecutor’s announcement, attorneys for Tamir’s family decried the grand jury process and renewed their calls for the Department of Justice to bring federal charges. The caller added that the gun was “probably fake”, and that the person waving it was “probably a juvenile”.

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