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| Tamir Rice, 12 years old |
Video shows Cleveland officer shooting 12-year-old Tamir Rice within seconds
Police Release Video, Officers’ Names in Tamir Rice Shooting
Cops who shot 12-year-old boy in the stomach watched him lie in agony and gave NO first aid before he died hours later
CLEVELAND, Ohio-- The video showing the fatal shooting of 12-year-old Tamir Rice is horrific, heartbreaking and hopefully an impetus for changes in police tactics, dispatch procedures and the manufacturing of toy guns.
The video shows the tragic end result of two Cleveland police officers responding to a lethally incomplete and inaccurate dispatch call of a man pointing a gun at the Cudell recreation center park. The 'man' was 12-year-old Tamir Rice.
The 'gun' was an Airsoft toy gun without the orange toy indicator cap on the end. Like helpless guardian angels watching from the sky, viewers see the last movements of a boy who is oblivious that his life is about to suddenly end. Tamir can be seen standing on the sidewalk and sitting at a picnic table, aimlessly pointing his toy gun, seemingly at the empty loneliness that hangs in the air as cold as the white snow covering the ground, that in seconds will be red with all of a life yet to be lived.
Moments after Tamir puts his toy gun in his waistband and walks out of the gazebo he was sitting in, a Cleveland police cruiser speeds into view, cutting off Tamir's path. Within two seconds of the passenger door flying open and Tamir reaching to his waistband, he is fatally shot by 26-year-old rookie officer Timothy Loehmann.
It happened so fast Tamir stopped moving before even the police cruiser did. While Tamir is shot, lying on the ground, Officer Loehmann can be seen darting to the rear of the cruiser for cover. His partner, Cleveland Police veteran Frank Garmback, goes to the front passenger side of the car and points his gun at the already subdued Tamir. First aid isn't administered until 4 minutes later by an FBI agent working a nearby case. Deputy Chief Edward Tomba said the release of the tape "is not an effort to exonerate." The word that comes to mind when seeing a 12-year-old with a toy gun fatally shot by a rookie cop within two seconds of encountering him is not "exonerate." Tomba said,
"We've got two officers that were out there protecting the public that just had to , you know, do something that nobody wants to do." But the original 9-1-1 call and the video raises doubts about whether they really had "to do something nobody wants to do". That original 9-1-1 caller to police said twice it may be a kid and the gun he was pointing was probably fake. This critical information was never relayed to the responding officers.
Would it have altered their tactics and approach? Would the responding officers in the infamous chase incident responded differently if the dispatch call said "reported shots fired-possible car backfire." It's more than a little troubling that this incident happened after the reckless police chase that left two unarmed people dead in hail of police bullets.
Reportedly,the cruiser flying up on the lawn, coming within two-feet of Tamir, was a tactic intended to cut off his intended escape path. It did that, but the speed in which cruiser moved and the officer shot, also appears to have cut off any time for Tamir to respond cooperatively.
From Horizons:
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6 comments:
"According to the FBI’s Uniform Crime Report, in 2013 there were 461 “justifiable homicides” by police — defined as “the killing of a felon by a law enforcement officer in the line of duty.” In all but three of these reported killings, officers used firearms.
By contrast, there were no fatal police shootings in Great Britain last year. Not one. In Germany, there have been eight police killings over the past two years. In Canada — a country with its own frontier ethos and no great aversion to firearms — police shootings average about a dozen a year."
The video is in complete discord with the police report and I think I know which wins out.
The executed this child pure and simple.
A certain blog is running a graphic on police dying in the line of duty contrasted to Ferguson. The meme that is being maintained is obvious. What goes unstated is that those deaths occurred largely due to traffic accidents and "sovereign citizen" incidents.
Black children are not the issue. But the myth continues.
In the last few years, over a dozen white, right-wing anti-government terrorists have targeted police officers resulting in the deaths of over 10 cops. Yet this is so invisible even people living in Austin don’t know about it. When I mentioned this to a buddy of mine, a white conservative cop, he waved it away saying criminals killed more cops than white terrorists have.
It’s obvious the blinkers are on, EVEN AMONG COPS. Yes, criminals kill cops, but can you imagine the outcry if a dozen cops had been killed by Muslims? The St Louis Police Officer’s Association demands an apology from football players for raising their hands in sympathy with the Brown family, but where is the outrage against the Republican officeholder who said she’d kill government officials who “tried to take away her rights”? Where is the outrage against the NRA that enables military weapons to be openly sold in the US (and they get around this by saying weapons like the AR15 aren’t “military”.)
Cops ARE being targeted by the right. Cliven Bundy was proof. He was a hero until his racism was too strident even for the right. Yet the cops still ignore the threat posed by right-wing terrorism and, instead, shake down black US citizens who walk with their hands in their pockets in the winter.
Ducky,
I don't see how the police can defend shooting a 12-year old 2 seconds after pulling up in front of him. That is verified: 2 seconds and the child was fatally shot. We've come to a disgusting place in our culture when grown men with lethal weapons shoot children first and find out they were wrong after the child dies.
Nothing excuses what they did.
Oh, and now the usual hate mongrels are out there dredging up dirt on this child's parents, as though he deserved this ignominious death because his father is a creep?
NNNB,
Racism is systemic in our culture. If a group of black men had done to the federal officers and police what the Bundy supporters did, there would have been mobs in the street calling for Obama and Holder to declare Martial law.
I'm Skippy's Mom,
We have the most guns and the most gun deaths than any other country on the planet. But there's absolutely no correlation...
The Right in this country will be its own demise for sure. Low morals and no accountability
The TeaPublicans have gone so far right What a bunch of kooks they are.
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