Tamir Rice shooting

nighttimer said:

Oh hey, didja know it's Tamir Rice's own damn fault the cops shot him down like a dog? It's true!

There are times when there are no words. Mostly because those words would be unbelievably angry and profane.

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You have to wonder if the lawyers who come up with those types of argument really believe them or say them with gritted teeth while thinking "paycheck" over and over again.

LittlePinto said:

You have to wonder if the lawyers who come up with those types of argument really believe them or say them with gritted teeth while thinking "paycheck" over and over again.

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It's the standard response to a lawsuit, that's all. The city will settle before it ever goes to court.

rugcat said:

It's the standard response to a lawsuit, that's all.

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+1

For the most part, to preserve an affirmative defense, it must be pled (and, generally, each factual allegation of the petition/complaint must be admitted or denied, although certain states permit "general denials").


The dog who bit your child was not my dog. If it was my dog, it was his first bite ever. If it wasn't his first bite, your child provoked my dog, etc.

dfwtinman said:

The dog who bit your child was not my dog. If it was my dog, it was his first bite ever. If it wasn't his first bite, your child provoked my dog, etc.

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Interesting. Does that logic also apply to dead Black kids shot by White cops?

Cleveland Police Patrolmen's Association Steve Loomis certainly does.

Nothing gets Steve Loomis churning faster than questions about what happened on the day that Tamir Rice was shot.

His constant refrain: The police are heroes misunderstood by a public being fed a steady, media-generated, activist-fueled diet of false information about how they do their jobs.

“Tamir Rice is an absolute example of that,” Loomis said. “There’s this perception that police just slid up in the car and shot him. That’s not reality from the officers’ perception. They acted based on what they knew at the time.”

On November 22, a resident called police to report “probably a juvenile” waving a gun “that was probably fake” in the park at Cleveland’s Cudell Recreation Center. As has been widely noted, the dispatcher failed to tell officers answering the call, Timothy Loehmann and driver Frank Garmback, that the gun could be fake.

“Dispatcher information wouldn’t have changed anything,” Loomis said. “There’s a guy saying, ‘There’s a kid waving a gun around here and he’s scaring the shit out of me.’ If it’s a toy, then why are you calling? You don’t see that part in the video that shows him pointing at people and cars going by.”

What the surveillance camera video does show is Tamir talking on a cellphone and goofing around in the snow with an air pellet gun in his hand minutes before the police car zoomed into the park just feet away from him. Within two seconds, Loehmann rushed out of the passenger side of the car and Tamir dropped to the ground. He lay on the ground unattended for four minutes until an FBI agent in the area showed up and administered first aid. Hours later, Tamir died in a hospital.

Loomis objects to much of the above depiction of events, shifting between past and present tense as he explains why.

“Tamir Rice is in the wrong,” he said. “He’s menacing. He’s 5-feet-7, 191 pounds. He wasn’t that little kid you’re seeing in pictures. He’s a 12-year-old in an adult body. Tamir looks to his left and sees a police car. He puts his gun in his waistband. Those people—99 percent of the time those people run away from us. We don’t want him running into the rec center. That could be a whole other set of really bad events. They’re trying to flush him into the field. Frank [the driver] is expecting the kid to run. The circumstances are so fluid and unique. …

“The guy with the gun is not running. He’s walking toward us. He’s squaring off with Cleveland police and he has a gun. Loehmann is thinking, ‘Oh my God, he’s pulling it out of his waistband.’”

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Oh my God. Those poor officers! What else could they do? They had to kill that menacing 12-year-old kid in an adult body.

Shame on Tamir Rice for scaring those poor officers. And shame on Michael Brown, Trayvon Martin, John Crawford, Eric Garner and Akai Gurley, Jordan Davis for scaring their killers.

So many scary Black guys. So many cops and vigilantes to make them dead and less scary Black guys.

nighttimer said:

Interesting. Does that logic also apply to dead Black kids shot by White cops?

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The logic I was expressing simply relates to the "logic" of pleading an "answer" to a "complaint." Please don't assume you know my position on this shooting, certainly not based on my posts to date.

Not that it changes much of anything, but apparently the city realized how egregious their language was and has apologized.

On Monday afternoon, Cleveland Mayor Frank G. Jackson apologized to the Rice family and Cleveland residents “for our poor use of words and our insensitivity” in the filing.

“In an attempt to protect all of our defenses, we used words and we phrased things in such a way that was very insensitive,” he said at a news conference. “Very insensitive to tragedy in general, the family and the victim in particular.”

He said the city would be filing an amended court document using more sensitive language.

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I'd rather they file charges against Loehmann, settle with Rice's family, and get to work on fixing the giant fucking mess that is their police department, but whatever.

The mayor can shove his apology sideways where the sun don't shine.

dfwtinman said:

The logic I was expressing simply relates to the "logic" of pleading an "answer" to a "complaint." Please don't assume you know my position on this shooting, certainly not based on my posts to date.

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I assume nothing. I merely read and then I ask questions.

There will be no criminal charges filed in the Tamir Rice shooting.

The grand jury found that the police actions did not warrant criminal charges, even if negligence was involved.

I believe I'm in the minority, but I tend to agree. You have a cowboy cop who should never have been on the police department; you have a dispatcher who withheld information that it was a juvenile and probably a fake gun; you have officers arriving next to the boys at top speed.

A bad cop, bad police work, and a department that tolerated these things. I would imagine a huge civil settlement will ensue. But given the facts of the case, I do not believe any jury would have convicted the officers involved if the prosecutor had filed a criminal case.

Mr. McGinty said it was “indisputable” that Tamir was drawing the weapon from his waistband when he was shot — either to hand it over to the officers or to show them that it was not a real firearm. But Mr. McGinty said there was no way for the officers to know that as they pulled up.

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http://mobile.nytimes.com/2015/12/2...leveland.html?referer=https://www.google.com/

I'm disappointed the prosecutor didn't consider misdemeanor charges.

All a grand jury considers is felonies. A prosecutor is still allowed and entitled to file any misdemeanor charges that might fit. In Ohio, he could have filed negligent homicide:

2903.05 Negligent homicide.

(A) No person shall negligently cause the death of another or the unlawful termination of another's pregnancy by means of a deadly weapon or dangerous ordnance as defined in section 2923.11 of the Revised Code.

(B) Whoever violates this section is guilty of negligent homicide, a misdemeanor of the first degree.

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As an M1, that's up to 6 months in jail, and $1,000 in fines. I think both officers were negligent here. He didn't have to die.

I'd like to see charges on the dispatcher as well, but I think the malfeasance/misfeasance sections won't work.

Just Another Day in Post-Racial America.

This outcome was so obvious--so painfully obvious--even Ray Charles could have seen it coming and he's both blind and dead.

Nobody will ever convince me if Tamir Rice had been a 12-year-old White kid named Todd Rice and everything else remains equal that the grand jury wouldn't have brought an indictment against Timothy Loehmann.

But Rice had the bad luck to be born Black and his life doesn't matter. Certainly not to Timothy McGinty and his handpicked grand jury and pro-cop experts who were never interested in justice, only giving the appearance they were.

What does a Black parent tell their son or daughter what the legal stamp of approval of Tamir Rice's murder by the Cleveland Police means? Lie to them that they are valued and protected members of society or tell them the truth their lives have no meaning and they possess no rights, not even the right to live because a cop can take that away from them at any time for any reason and walk.

Sandra Bland last week and Tamir Rice this week. Wanna take bets on the cop who blew away Walter Scott taking a walk? Cops don't go to jail for killing Black men, Black women or Black children. It's like looking for hen's teeth or whiskey in a wine glass. It doesn't happen.

America has a legal system. It does not have a justice system and it never has. As if anyone really needed yet another reminder.

the case report, with photos.

http://prosecutor.cuyahogacounty.us/pdf_prosecutor/en-US/Rice Case Report FINAL FINAL 12-28a.pdf

I too think an independent investigation should have been instituted. Prosecutors have great latitude and how they present a case to the grand jury, what they decide to let the grand jury hear, and what they do not.

Regardless of the facts of the case, having a local prosecutor, who works closely with the police department every day, present this case to the grand jury is going to raise suspicions as to the thoroughness and accuracy of the presentation. I think the conclusions drawn after a presentation by an outside institution, whatever the result, would have been accepted with a bit more trust.

What I don't get, from watching that bit of video, was since Tamir appeared to be alone in the park, and so not threatening anyone with his "weapon" why did they have to rush him like that? Also, if the police really did perceive a threat (to themselves), wouldn't they have stopped short of where he stood and warn him, tell him to put the gun down?

Maze Runner said:

What I don't get, from watching that bit of video, was since Tamir appeared to be alone in the park, and so not threatening anyone with his "weapon" why did they have to rush him like that? Also, if the police really did perceive a threat, wouldn't they have stopped short of where he stood and warn him, tell him to put the gun down?

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Because they were bad at their job with an overblown cowboy mentality.

They created the situation where a tragedy ensued. That's why if there's a civil trial they will be found negligent and the city will pay out millions. But once having unnecessarily created the situation, their actions, when faced by a situation they themselves created, nevertheless did not rise to the level of criminal conduct.

Ohio is an open carry state. They still executed Tamir Rice within two seconds.

Tamir's murder isn't a Black Lives Matter problem or an Black people problem. It's an American problem and not until America realizes the lives of your Black children are every bit as important as your White children's lives, will there ever be an end to this madness.



Don't ever expect to see that happen in my remaining time on this mudball.

In the wake of the grand jury's decision not to indict Timothy Loehmann for the death of Tamir Rice, the response has been eerie in its calmness. Or it is weary resignation?

We've been here so many times before.

It only took a year, but today Cuyahoga County District Attorney Timothy McGinty told the world something everyone already knew: he would not indict the two cops who blew away Tamir Rice in 2014.

Just like they didn’t indict Daniel Pantaleo for killing Eric Garner.
Just like they didn’t indict Darren Wilson for killing Michael Brown.
Just like they didn’t indict the two cops for killing John Crawford III.
Just like they didn’t indict Dante Servin for killing Rekia Boyd.
Just like they didn’t indict the two LAPD cops for killing Ezell Ford.
Just like they didn’t indict anyone for killing Kenneth Chamberlain, Sr.
Just like they didn’t indict anyone for Sandra Bland’s death.

Same as it ever was.

All this circle jerk did was reaffirm what was already a known fact. Cops don't get indicted for killing Black people. If by some miracle, they are indicted they aren't convicted as the recent mistrial in Baltimore for one of the cops in the Freddie Gray "nickel ride" case illustrated and was preceded by Randall Kerrick walking away scott free in for gunning down Jonathan Ferrell in 2013.

This is not miscarriages of justice. This is Standard Operating Procedure and it is very good news for Officer Michael Slager who gunned down Walter Scott. Slager's attorneys are arguing to expedite his trial. Can't blame 'em. Strike while the iron is hot, I suppose.

Another reason to expect nothing different will result from the execution of Laquan McDonald in Chicago or the recent shooting incident which left Quintonio LeGrier and Bettie Jones dead and still no formal explanation of what happened, why the officer opened fire, or even who he was.

In light of what has gone before, there is no cause to believe what follows next will end any differently.

In America, police officers are agents of the state and thus bound by the social contract in a way that criminals, and even random citizens, are not. Criminals and random citizens are not paid to protect other citizens. Police officers are. By that logic, one might surmise that the police would be better able to mediate conflicts than community members. In Chicago, this appears, very often, not to be the case.

It will not do to note that 99 percent of the time the police mediate conflicts without killing people anymore than it will do for a restaurant to note that 99 percent of the time rats don’t run through the dining room. Nor will it do to point out that most black citizens are killed by other black citizens, not police officers, anymore than it will do to point out that most American citizens are killed by other American citizens, not terrorists. If officers cannot be expected to act any better than ordinary citizens, why call them in the first place? Why invest them with any more power?

Two days after Jones and LeGrier were killed, a district attorney in Ohio declined to prosecute the two officers who drove up, and within two seconds of arriving, killed the 12-year-old Tamir Rice. No one should be surprised by this. In America, we have decided that it is permissible, that it is wise, that it is moral for the police to de-escalate through killing. A standard which would not have held for my father in West Baltimore, which did not hold for me in Harlem, is reserved for those who have the maximum power—the right to kill on behalf of the state. When police can not adhere to the standards of the eighborhood, of citizens, or of parents, what are they beyond a bigger gun and a sharper sword? By what right do they enforce their will, save force itself?

When Bettie Jones’s brother displays zero confidence in an investigation into the killing of his sister, he is not being cynical. He is shrewdly observing a government that executed a young man and sought to hide that fact from citizens. He is intelligently assessing a local government which, for two decades, ran a torture ring. What we have made of our police departments America, what we have ordered them to do, is a direct challenge to any usable definition of democracy. A state that allows its agents to kill, to beat, to tase, without any real sanction, has ceased to govern and has commenced to simply rule.

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Logically, what follows next in any state which systematically oppresses, terrorizes, and degrades a segment of its citizens is either sullen submission or violent revolution. The response thus far to the decision not to charge anyone for Tamir Rice's death has been conventional and traditional.

Republican presidential contender Jeb Bush was asked about the decision in the Rice case and after being initially confused by the question, regrouped and declared, "the process worked."

"If there is a grand jury that looks at all the facts and doesn't indict maybe there's reasons for that. I don't believe that every grand jury is racist."

"In every community where you have these cases, elected officials and the police chief need to engage with the community to rebuild trust. These tragedies that take place, there's way too many of them, and it doesn't change my view -- because we have those kinds of well-publicized cases of violence -- that we should be supportive of law enforcement."

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That's exactly the sort of reactive, robotic, knee-jerk response I've come to expect from Bush, but it mirrors the belief of many Americans that the system works, there truly is equal justice under the law, and race is a completely artificial construct only employed by a grievance industry of race hustlers.

A few years ago, I did a two-week stint on a grand jury. An interesting experience. The prosecutors come in and run their rap about why we should indict some no-good son of a bitch who’s up for everything from domestic abuse to dealing drugs to murder. I can’t recall how many indictments we rubber-stamped, but it had to be at least 90 percent. A properly manipulated grand jury will pretty much give a prosecutor anything they want.

Grand juries are built to be a tool of prosecutors. They don’t hear from both sides in a case, like a trial jury would. They hear only from the prosecutor, who decides what evidence and testimony is presented.


That’s why the old saying goes that a grand jury will “indict a ham sandwich” if a prosecutor tells them to — because the prosecutor calls the shots. That saying, however, assumes the prosecutor wants to prosecute and, ultimately, secure a conviction.
The Rice case strongly suggests that the opposite is also true — grand juries will let the sandwich walk, if that’s what the prosecutor wants. In this case, McGinty used the grand jury as more of a sounding board for an exoneration of the potential defendants, rather than as a review of possible charges against them.


His 70-page report reads like defense counsel brief, not a neutral assessment of potential charges. (It even has headings like “Officers Loehmann and Garmback’s subsequent statements are consistent with the evidence in this case” and “The incident conforms to the Cleveland Police Department’s active shooter policy.”)


This approach — using the grand jury to review arguments on behalf of potential police defendants, not to prosecute them — fits the model of several recent inquiries of police shootings.


Just last week, Texas prosecutors announced that a grand jury declined to charge any Waller County jail officials in the death of Sandra Bland, a 28-year-old woman who was arrested after a routine traffic stop caught on video and was later found dead in her cell. Jail staff said they discovered her hanging by a plastic bag, an apparent suicide. Her family maintains that the circumstances are suspicious.


Prosecutors convened the grand jury to consider potential charges against the jail staff but then said they already concluded that her death was a suicide.


Which makes no sense.


If Bland killed herself, there is no crime to charge. The grand jury should have no charges to bring, and nothing to review.


If prosecutors believed she was killed, then they should have presented those charges to the grand jury. But the Texas prosecutors gave away their game by saying, essentially, that they asked jurors to consider potential charges for a crime they say didn’t happen. If that sounds hard to follow, it is, because the prosecutors are obfuscating on purpose.
Prosecutors in these cases hide behind the grand jury process, one that is supposedly independent, while pushing grand jurors toward their decision, all the while claiming that juries might have reached different conclusions.


As a legal process, it’s reminiscent of those maddening staircase sketches by M.C. Escher, with each flight of stairs collapsing into another flight of stairs, an endless optical illusion. You can’t follow the logic because there is none.

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Jeb Bush says the process worked. Perhaps he is right. The process worked. The officers are vindicated in their decision to shoot and kill an armed suspect, order is restored to the universe and God is in heaven.

But something about this case is still a bit off.

Within two seconds of the car’s arrival, Officer Loehmann shot Tamir in the abdomen from point-blank range, raising doubts that he could have warned the boy three times to raise his hands, as the police later claimed. And when Tamir’s 14-year-old sister came running up minutes later, the officers, who are white, tackled her to the ground and put her in handcuffs, intensifying later public outrage about the boy’s death. When his distraught mother arrived, the officers also threatened to arrest her unless she calmed down, the mother, Samaria Rice, said.

The dehumanization of Tamir Rice and his family was cruel and sadistic. But the process worked. But who did it work for?

The same folks it always works for.

In high-profile, controversial cases, where officers use lethal force, prosecutors face a dilemma. If they don’t file charges against officers, they risk the wrath of the community; if they do file charges, they risk the wrath of the police and their powerful unions. By opting for secret grand jury proceedings, prosecutors pass the buck, using grand jurors as pawns for political cover. The Michael Brown and Eric Garner cases are examples of how prosecutors manipulate the grand jury process.…


We will never know why there was no indictment because what the prosecutors said, how they said it, what evidence they presented, and what they asked the witnesses will forever remain secret, unless the transcript is opened to the public by court order.


By convening grand juries, the prosecutors in Missouri and New York ensured that there would be no justice for Michael Brown and Eric Garner. Sadly, these two men are gone. But if we abolish criminal grand juries, at least their deaths will not have been in vain.

~ LaDoris Hazzard Cordell, a retired judge and independent police auditor and an advocate for elminating grand juries.

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nighttimer said:

Ohio is an open carry state. They still executed Tamir Rice within two seconds.

Tamir's murder isn't a Black Lives Matter problem or an Black people problem. It's an American problem and not until America realizes the lives of your Black children are every bit as important as your White children's lives, will there ever be an end to this madness.

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This. NT, your points about race when these incidents get brought up are valid 98% of the time from my POV. A couple of cases here and there when I give the officers some benefit of the doubt. And, kudos to you, I've seen you do that also.

I wish I could figure out a way to remove race from the conversation. NOT because race isn't behind this. Instead, I want to stop concentrating on the victims of this behavior and start concentrating on the officers. The behaviors that we see are atrocious, vile, evil, and the race (really ANY facet of the identity) of the victim does nothing to change that.

Look, YouTube is hardly objective evidence, but just go there and do a search for "police." What you're going to see is thousands upon thousands of videos of officers asserting false authority and outright threatening citizens who attempt to assert their constitutional rights.

Over.

And over.

And over again.

A US citizen asserting a legal right to not cooperate is NOT a troublemaker. They are a citizen. A refusal to allow an officer into one's home is a constitutional right. Not an act of obstruction of justice (not automatically).

This stuff is all tied together behind a blue wall of oppression that definitely hits the minority communities all out of proportion to their fraction of the overall population of this country. But it's not ONLY there. We need to stop thinking that this is a race problem. I hate to say that, because race IS involved. "*** While Black" is a real issue, sure enough.

But this is a POLICE problem. There are videos of women stripped by male officers, prisoners in cuffs thrown into cells face first, and on and on.

Officers, The Constitution does not give you rights. It gives PEOPLE rights. The moment you employ that badge (on duty or off), you are an agent of government, and The Constitution (and simple professional ethics) demands that you respect those rights. Start doing your damn job.

Actually, the constitution does give police officer rights but it also gives restrictions to the exercise of those rights by establishing that ordinary citizens have rights as well.

Xelebes said:

Actually, the constitution does give police officer rights but it also gives restrictions to the exercise of those rights by establishing that ordinary citizens have rights as well.

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What rights?

robjvargas said:

What rights?

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Those listed in the main body of the Constitution. The stuff that came before the Bill of Rights.

Xelebes said:

Actually, the constitution does give police officer rights but it also gives restrictions to the exercise of those rights by establishing that ordinary citizens have rights as well.

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Cite please? I don't think you are reading what you think you are.

The Constitution grants powers to the government, and guarantees rights to the citizens.

The differences are subtle, but important.

One thing that desperately needs to happen is that the investigative and prosecutorial authority needs to be taken away from local officials who have a professional relationship with those being investigated. There's an inherent conflict of interest in these cases that can never be solved, and which would not be tolerated within any other institution under similar circumstances.