“So Killing Tamir Rice Was…Reasonable?”: A State-Sanctioned Drive-By—And Nobody Will Pay A Price For That
He is going to get away with it.
The Cleveland police officer who shot an unarmed 12-year-old boy will never spend a day in jail. He will never be charged with any criminal offense. He will never be booked and fingerprinted, never handcuffed. He will never be forced to explain himself before a jury of his peers.
Few things unnerve me. I am slow to anger and am not prone to tears. But I was both Saturday night—pissed off and crying—because somebody somewhere said it was OK to kill a black child. Two investigators, working at the behest of a local prosecutor, said killing Tamir Rice was reasonable.
For nearly a year, that same prosecutor has been looking for a way to cover his proverbial ass, to assuage public pressure and help us all forget that a rookie cop who repeatedly failed field and fire arms training before getting kicked off another department shot a black kid without provocation.
Tamir was shot on sight.
It was clear that the officers did not know the entire incident was captured on camera. They said Tamir was sitting at the table with a group of people when, in fact, he was alone.
They said Tamir reached into his waistband and pulled out the toy gun before he was then shot and killed by Officer Timothy Loehmann. “He gave me no choice. He reached for the gun and there was nothing I could do,” Loehmann told a fellow officer in the moments after he shot Tamir.
That was a lie too. The video clearly shows that Tamir used both hands to hold his shirt up to expose the BB gun just before he was shot and fell from the table.
Another demonstrable lie: Loehmann also claimed that he repeatedly ordered Tamir to put his hands up. In fact, Tamir was shot within two seconds of the squad car door opening. The wheels were barely at a complete stop. There was no time to order Tamir to do anything, let alone three times, as Loehmann contends, and no time for Tamir to react.
Tamir never removed the toy from his waistband and never pointed it at the officers, thus at no point could they have determined whether the orange safety tip was missing. Tamir presented no threat to anyone and, even if the gun were real, Ohio is an open-carry state. The minimum age is 18, but remember the officers said they thought Tamir was in his 20s.
As Tamir lay on the icy concrete fighting for his life, neither Loehmann nor his partner Frank Garmback thought to render first aid. An FBI agent who happened to be in the area working a bank robbery came by a few minutes later and tried desperately to resuscitate the boy.
In the end, none of that will matter. Not the videotape, not the lies, not the failure to render aid to a dying boy. There will be no grand jury indictment and the probability that Loehmann will face criminal charges is hovering around zero. Even if Cuyahoga County prosecutor Timothy McGinty were of the mind to take this case to trial, the deck would be stacked against him.
Such charges against a police officer are extraordinarily rare in Ohio or anywhere else in the country. When there is a grand jury indictment, the probability of a conviction is even smaller. Convincing 12 people that a member of law enforcement acted with illegal force in the killing of a suspect is a steep hill to climb. When the officer is white and victim is black, the pathway to justice grows even rockier.
However, McGinty appears to be participating in the card shuffling. The investigation has dragged on for nearly a year. If the roles had been reversed—a 12-year-old black boy shooting a white police officer—Tamir would have been indicted on first-degree murder charges and tried as an adult. Had Tamir lived, he would have faced criminal charges. An incident report filed a full week after he died alleged “aggravated menacing” and “inducing panic.” Those charges were “abated by death.”
Without question, tape or no tape, if the roles were reversed, McGinty would have sprinted to the grand jury room and dared anyone to challenge that decision. He certainly would not be gaming the public and rigging the process by releasing two reports that appear to exonerate the officers on a Saturday night before a grand jury has had a chance to review the evidence.
We should be troubled by the notion that Loehmann was an officer at all, that somebody on the Cleveland police department saw fit to hand him a badge and a gun in the first place. Another department in the area previously fired him because he was unable to follow “basic functions as instructed.” He experienced a “dangerous loss of composure” during a weapons training exercise and his performance was “dismal,” wrote a former commander. The written memo said further that Loehmann demonstrated “a lack of maturity.”
“I do not believe time, nor training, will be able to change or correct these deficiencies,” the author of the memo wrote.
I resent that there is a system in place designed, ready, and eager to protect Loehmann. Hiring him without reviewing his personnel records was nothing short of malfeasance. I resent that anyone deemed him worthy to serve and protect.
But more than that, I resent the notion that our sons are required to meet a different standard when confronted by police or other people in authority. I resent the fact that my sons and daughters cannot play with the same toys. I resent the fact that young Tamir could not play in a public park without the threat of death or jail. I resent that anyone anywhere would dare blame Tamir’s mother for her son’s death. I resent that fact that open-carry laws are not designed to protect my black children and me, but rather to protect society from me and my black children.
Whether driven by implicit racial bias or plain incompetence, despite assurances from the district attorney that he will take the matter to a grand jury, I do not harbor a scintilla of confidence that Loehmann will ever answer for killing this child.
I resent the fact that Tamir is dead—killed in a state-sanctioned drive-by—and that nobody will pay a price for that.
By: Goldie Taylor, The Daily Beast, October 12, 2015
“Put-Up-Or-Shut-Up”: GOP Candidates Blame Obama For Police Shootings, Cite No Evidence
U.S. Attorney General Loretta Lynch yesterday “strongly condemned shootings of law enforcement officers in Texas and Illinois and issued an unequivocal message of support for police.” The comments came on the heels of Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) arguing that “the entire Obama administration” has shown “hostility [towards] law enforcement.”
Cruz, of course, backed up his argument by pointing to … nothing. Soon after, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie (R) appeared on Fox News and said the White House’s support for law enforcement has been “ambiguous,” which contributes to violence and lawlessness. To support the contention, the scandal-plagued Republican also pointed to … nothing.
Taking an even less subtle approach, Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker (R) published a piece on a far-right blog yesterday, reflecting on “a serious problem.”
In the last six years under President Obama, we’ve seen a rise in anti-police rhetoric. Instead of hope and change, we’ve seen racial tensions worsen and a tendency to use law enforcement as a scapegoat.
Look, eventually we’re going to reach a put-up-or-shut-up moment. We talked yesterday about how offensive it is when politicians exploit the deaths of police officers for partisan gain, but as the number of GOP candidates connecting the White House to the slayings grows, it becomes all the more important for Republican officials to do one specific thing:
Back up their ugly claims with some shred of proof.
Of course, at this point, I can imagine some conservative readers yelling at their computer screens. “Oh yeah, smart guy? What about you? Where’s your evidence that the president has offered unambiguous support for law enforcement?”
It’s not an unreasonable point, but it’s also surprisingly easy to spend a little time online and find all kinds of examples. About a month ago, Obama told the NAACP’s annual convention, “Our communities are safer thanks to brave police officers and hard-working prosecutors who put those violent criminals in jail.” In May, he said, “To be a police officer takes a special kind of courage…. It takes a special kind of courage to run towards danger, to be a person that residents turn to when they’re most desperate.”
Here was the president in May at the National Peace Officers Memorial Service:
“Your jobs are inherently dangerous. The reminders are too common. Just a few days ago, two police officers were killed in the line of duty in Mississippi. A week before that, an officer was killed in the line of duty in Queens. A few months before that, two of his fellow officers in the NYPD were killed as well. We cannot erase every darkness or danger from the duty that you’ve chosen. We can offer you the support you need to be safer. We can make the communities you care about and protect safer as well. We can make sure that you have the resources you need to do your job. We can do everything we have to do to combat the poverty that plagues too many communities in which you have to serve. We can work harder, as a nation, to heal the rifts that still exist in some places between law enforcement and the people you risk your lives to protect.
“We owe it to all of you who wear the badge with honor. And we owe it to your fellow officers who gave their last full measure of devotion. Most of all, we can say thank you. We can say we appreciate you and we’re grateful for the work that you do each and every day. And we can thank the families who bear the burden alongside you.”
In March, reflecting on the crisis in Ferguson, Obama said, “The overwhelming number of law enforcement officers have a really hard, dangerous job, and they do it well and they do it fairly, and they do it heroically. And I strongly believe that. And the overwhelming majority of police departments across the country are really thinking hard about how do we make sure that we are protecting and serving everybody equally. And we need to honor those folks, and we need to respect them, and not just assume that they’ve got ill will or they’re doing a bad job.”
Even in this year’s State of the Union address, the president added, “We may have different takes on the events of Ferguson and New York. But surely we can understand a father who fears his son can’t walk home without being harassed. And surely we can understand the wife who won’t rest until the police officer she married walks through the front door at the end of his shift.”
The list goes on and on. There are so many examples like these – the ones noted above are just from 2015 – spanning Obama’s entire presidency. Over and over again, he’s voiced support and gratitude towards Americans in law enforcement.
Ted Cruz said this week that the police feel under “assault from the president,” which the far-right senator considers “fundamentally wrong.”
It is fundamentally wrong, but not for the reasons Cruz thinks.
The underlying allegation is no mild rebuke. Republican officials, some seeking the nation’s highest office, are publicly accusing the president of the United States, not only of hostility towards law enforcement, but also of contributing to a dynamic in which officers are being killed. That’s a serious accusation, which requires substantiation.
If GOP officials can’t back it up, they ought to move on to some other kind of nonsense.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, September 3, 2015
“Backlash Notes, Cruz Edition”: Climbing On Board The Same Old Twentieth Century Law-And-Order Bandwagon
Ever since the virtual strike of cops in New York and Baltimore in conjunction with protests against police shootings of unarmed African-Americans, I’ve been concerned that on the brink of potential bipartisan action on criminal justice reform we’d see a 1960s-1970s style backlash fed by vote hungry conservative politicians. The recent spikein some forms of violent crime after decades of gradually declining rates struck me as likely to create some ugly racial dynamics as well, or at least “buyer’s remorse” among conservatives for police or criminal justice reform.
With his usual lack of inhibition, Donald Trump was first to get in touch with his inner Frank Rizzo, arguing that even if police were unjustly targeting African-Americans it was important to “give back power to the police” to deal with the “crime wave.”
Now Trump’s buddy Ted Cruz is climbing on board the same old twentieth century law-and-order bandwagon after the shooting of a police officer in Houston (as reported by TPM’s Allegra Kirkland:
Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) suggested President Obama bore some of the blame for Friday’s fatal shooting of a sheriff’s deputy in Houston, Texas. During a campaign stop in New Hampshire, Cruz told reporters that “cops across this country are feeling the assault” thanks to the “vilification” of law enforcement by administration officials, the Dallas Morning News reported.
“These are brave heroes who risk their lives keeping us safe,” Cruz said. “And I do think we’re seeing the manifestation of the rhetoric and vilification of law enforcement, of police, that is coming from the president of the United States and it’s coming from senior officials.”
Cruz’s comments come just days after Harris County deputy Darren Goforth was shot 15 times while pumping gas at a Houston Chevron station. No motive has yet been found for the killing, but the alleged shooter, Shannon Miles, has been charged with capital murder.
Local authorities, including Harris County Sherriff Ron Hickman, believe Goforth “was a target because he wore a uniform.”
Cruz suggested President Obama’s condemnation of the fatal shootings of unarmed black teenagers in cities including Ferguson, Missouri and Baltimore, Maryland helped to inflame anti-cop sentiment.
There you have it: express concern about the police shooting black people without cause and you are inciting cop-killers. Yet in the same breath Cruz accuses Obama of inflaming “racial divisions.”
Yeah, it’s feeling mighty 1970 out there.
By: Ed Kilgore, Contributing Writer, Political Animal Blog, The Washington Post, September 2, 2015
“Official Justifications For Savagery”: Police Officers Must Be Held To Higher Standard Of Conduct
The omnipresence of video cameras hasn’t restrained the impulses of violent police officers, it seems, but cameras have at least repudiated the narratives that have saved so many police from prosecution. In several cases, video footage has offered a truth that defies official justifications for savagery.
Because he was wearing a body camera that contradicted his account (stunning, yes, that he was aware he was being recorded), Ray Tensing has been charged with murder in the July death of Cincinnati motorist Samuel DuBose, whom Tensing, then a University of Cincinnati police officer, had stopped for a traffic violation. Tensing claimed that he shot DuBose because he feared for his life, but the footage doesn’t appear to show him in any danger.
Yet, the decision by Tensing’s superiors to prosecute him merely lays bare the remaining inequities in a criminal justice system that is by no means just. It is quite rare for police officers to be convicted and sent to prison for their unjustified violence, no matter the evidence against them.
(Indeed, it is still quite rare for police officers to be charged in the deaths of civilians. So far this year, 558 civilians have died at the hands of police, according to The Washington Post, which says that officers have been charged in only four cases, all of which were captured on video. In three of the cases, the victims were black, while the officers were white. In the fourth, the civilian was also white.)
Indeed, the criminal justice system is one of the last bastions of blatant racism, a pastiche of prejudices, wrongheaded stereotypes, and all-too-human assumptions. The implicit and explicit biases that color black people as dangerous and anti-social tend to let police officers, especially white officers, off the hook. Their crimes often go unpunished.
Perhaps you remember the trial of four Los Angeles cops in the brutal 1991 assault on Rodney King. Videotaped by a passer-by as they repeatedly beat and kicked a prostrate King, they were charged with assault with a deadly weapon and use of excessive force. Yet, none were convicted in a Simi Valley courtroom.
Two of the four, Stacey Koon and Laurence Powell, were later convicted after federal authorities charged them with violating King’s civil rights.
Still, U.S. District Court Judge John Davies was clearly sympathetic to the two men, saying that King had “contributed significantly to provoking the offense behavior.” While they faced up to 10 years in prison, he sentenced them to 30 months.
Now fast-forward a quarter-century. In May 2015, Cleveland police officer Michael Brelo, who is white, was acquitted of manslaughter in the 2012 deaths of an unarmed black motorist, Timothy Russell, and passenger, Malissa Williams. After other officers had ceased shooting and Russell had stopped his car — he had led the officers on a high-speed chase — Brelo jumped onto the hood of the vehicle and fired 15 shots.
The U.S. Department of Justice, by the way, considered that case when it issued a report that found the Cleveland Police Department had engaged in a long-running pattern of unnecessary force. More than 100 police officers pursued Russell’s vehicle because they believed they heard gunfire coming from the car, but Justice found it likely that the car had backfired.
Nevertheless, Cuyahoga County Judge John P. O’Donnell ruled that the “state did not prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the defendant, Michael Brelo, knowingly caused the deaths of Timothy Russell and Malissa Williams.” (O’Donnell presided over a bench trial — or trial without a jury.)
Law enforcement defenders would undoubtedly note that neither Rodney King nor Timothy Russell was a paragon of virtue. Both motorists failed to stop their vehicles, choosing to flee police. Their conduct was clearly wrong.
But neither King nor Russell took an oath to protect and serve. Neither man was given the badge and gun that ought to suggest a rigorous moral code and a significant degree of restraint.
In other words, police officers should be held to a higher standard of conduct. And if they behave like murderous thugs, they should be treated as such. Until they are, justice remains tantalizingly out of reach.
By: Cynthia Tucker Haynes, Pulitzer Prize for Commentary in 2007; The National Memo, August 1, 2015
“We Deserve Good Policing”: Legal Or Not, ‘Warrior Policing Mentality’ Leads To Deadly Outcomes
When I first heard about the arrest and subsequent death of Sandra Bland in Texas after she apparently tried to get out of the way of a police vehicle and failed to signal a lane change, I immediately thought of the University of South Carolina law professor (and ex-cop) Seth Stoughton’s distinction between the “warrior” and “guardian” models of policing, as explained here at TMS a while back.
So I was pleased to see that TPM recruited Stoughton to watch the daschcam video of the encounter between Texas trooper Brian Encinia and Bland and offer his commentary.
He concludes that Encinio did nothing illegal–but also avoided several opportunities to de-escalate the situation, pretty clearly because he thought it was important to have Bland acknowledge his authority. And so an encounter that might have been brief and harmless–it seems Encinio intended to give Bland a mere warning until she started acting uppity–turned confrontational, violent, and eventually, for Bland, lethal.
Concludes Stoughton:
When Encinia ordered Bland to exit her vehicle, she refused. “I don’t have to step out of my car.” Rather than handling the remainder of the stop with her sitting in the car, or explaining why he wanted her to step out of the car, or attempting to obtain her cooperation, or calmly explaining the law, Encinia simply invoked his legal authority, shouting at one point, “I gave you a lawful order.” He was right. It was lawful. And when Bland did not obey, she was refusing a lawful order, a crime under Texas law. Her arrest, like the confrontations that led up to it, may have been lawful, but it was entirely avoidable had Encinia chosen a different approach.
We all deserve more than legal policing. We deserve good policing.
Now it’s entirely possible Encinio was strictly following his training, which, as Stoughton has noted in the past, is often based on the “warrior model” notion that every citizen is a potential cop-killer and every encounter a potential shoot-out, making it incumbent on the officer to “stay in charge” from the first moment. But if this isn’t a situation where bad policing can be blamed on a “bad cop,” it’s all the more reason to examine our policies to make sure certain Americans don’t have to assume–as Sandra Bland seemed to fear, accurately–that minor traffic offenses can turn deadly.
By: Ed Kilgore, Contributing Writer, Political Animal Blog, The Washington Monthly, July 24, 2015
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