No Tamir Rice Indictment

Bet you’re shocked by this news.

After more than a year of investigation, a Cleveland grand jury declined to bring charges against either of the two police officers involved in the November 2014 shooting of Tamir Rice, a 12-year-old boy who was playing with a toy weapon in a park.

Cuyahoga County prosecutor Timothy J. McGinty announced the decision Monday afternoon, adding that he did not recommend that grand jury bringing charges and that he believes both of the Cleveland police officers involved were reasonable in their belief that Rice had a real weapon.

Let’s remember Maryland Scramble’s first rule of grand juries: what the prosecutor wants, the prosecutor gets. Only the prosecutor presents evidence. There’s no cross-examination, defense lawyers aren’t even allowed in the room.

The better question is: why didn’t the prosecutor want to indict this particular ham sandwich?

Two police officers, 26-year-old Timothy Loehmann and 46-year-old Frank Garmback, responded after receiving a police dispatch call “of a male black sitting on a swing and pointing a gun at people” in a city park. A caller reported that a male was pointing “a pistol” at random people in the Cudell Recreation Center. At the beginning of the call and again in the middle he says of the pistol “it’s probably fake.” Toward the end of the two-minute call, the caller stated “he is probably a juvenile.” However, this information was not relayed to Loehmann or Garmback on the initial dispatch. The officers reported that upon their arrival, Rice reached towards a gun in his waistband. Loehmann fired two shots before the zone car came to a halt and within two seconds of arriving on the scene, hitting Rice once in the torso. Neither officer administered any first aid to Rice after the shooting. He died on the following day.

The officer fired two shots before GETTING OUT OF THE CAR. That’s not a “perfect storm of humsn error,” as the Post quotes Timothy McGinty, but an execution of a black child by an out of control police officer. All you have to do is imagine what would have happened if Tamir Rice had been a white kid in the suburbs. First off it wouldn’t have happened, but if it did, there’d damn well be a ham sandwich indicted by now.

Until black lives matter more than they do now, any claim that “all lives matter” is nothing but a dodge or a defense for police vigilantism against minority communities. It’s not one thing that needs to change in the criminal justice system, it’s everything.

4 thoughts on “No Tamir Rice Indictment

  1. You mean indictment?  Art Brodsky Communications Consultant 301-908-7715 @artbrodskyCallSend SMSAdd to SkypeYou’ll need Skype CreditFree via Skype

    From: Maryland Scramble To: [email protected] Sent: Monday, December 28, 2015 3:28 PM Subject: [New post] No Tamir Rice Endorsement #yiv5127518901 a:hover {color:red;}#yiv5127518901 a {text-decoration:none;color:#0088cc;}#yiv5127518901 a.yiv5127518901primaryactionlink:link, #yiv5127518901 a.yiv5127518901primaryactionlink:visited {background-color:#2585B2;color:#fff;}#yiv5127518901 a.yiv5127518901primaryactionlink:hover, #yiv5127518901 a.yiv5127518901primaryactionlink:active {background-color:#11729E;color:#fff;}#yiv5127518901 WordPress.com | Jonathan posted: “Bet you’re shocked by this news.After more than a year of investigation, a Cleveland grand jury declined to bring charges against either of the two police officers involved in the November 2014 shooting of Tamir Rice, a 12-year-old boy who was playing wi” | |

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