Cleveland boy's death in police shooting declared homicide

[Jazzy]

Cleveland boy's death in police shooting declared homicide

The death of a 12-year-old Cleveland boy fatally shot by police in November has been formally ruled a homicide, according to a county autopsy report released on Friday that found he was struck once in the abdomen.

Tamir Rice, who was black, was shot on Nov. 22 by a white police officer responding to a call of a suspect waving a handgun around in a Cleveland park. The weapon turned out to be a replica that typically fires plastic pellets. The sixth-grader died the next day.

The Cuyahoga County Medical Examiner's autopsy report said Rice sustained a single wound to the left side of his abdomen that traveled from front to back and lodged in his pelvis.

The shooting came at a time of heightened national scrutiny of police use of force and two days before a grand jury declined to indict a white police officer in the Aug. 9 fatal shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri.

Rice was shot less than two seconds after the police car pulled up beside him in the park, police have said. They also released a security video of Rice in the park before and during the shooting.

Rice was 5 feet 7 inches tall and 195 pounds, according to the autopsy report.

Rice's mother, Samaria Rice, said on Monday the officers involved should be convicted. The family filed a lawsuit last week against the city of Cleveland and the two officers involved in Rice's shooting, who are on administrative leave.

The officer who shot Rice, Timothy Loehmann, had been on the Cleveland force for less than a year. A second officer, Frank Garmback, was driving the car. Both officers are white.

A grand jury investigates all police shootings in Cuyahoga County, which includes Cleveland.

The shooting of Rice, and grand jury decisions not to indict officers in the deaths of Brown or a black man who was put in a chokehold during an arrest in New York, have driven protests over the police use of force in the United States.

Cleveland's police force has been under a U.S. Department of Justice investigation, which found in a report released on Dec. 4 that the department systematically engages in excessive use of force.

Do you think this officer should be indicted? Why / Why not?

 

[Webster]

I think Ofc. Loehmann will be indicted for his actions above...if I had to guess a specific charge, I'd say it'll either be a negligent homicide or manslaughter charge; it'll really just depend on what the DA there believes gives them the best chance for a conviction at trial.

That's of course assuming the grand jury indicts in the first place, of course....

 

[DrLeftover]

"Can you say Political Scapegoat boys and girls? ... .... ... There, I knew you could."

 

[Webster]

"Can you say Political Scapegoat boys and girls? ... .... ... There, I knew you could."

That was my other thought, Doc...given what happened in Ferguson & Staten Island, this case had the bad luck, figuratively speaking, to occur at around the same time. The sharks are wanting blood and that officer in Cleveland looks to be the sacrificial lamb.

 

[Jazzy]

Replica toy guns should be banned... OR people need to understand that waving one around in a park or for that matter, anywhere else, could get you killed. Pointing one at a police officer is going to get you dead! Waiting to see if the kid is going to shoot at you with a real gun is going to get the officer dead! So, what do we do about criminals who can use a toy gun to terrorize people and rob them... I think the U.S. Supreme Court ruled once that committing unlawful acts with toy guns is punishable under the law if the victims are led to believe the gun is real! A kid is just as likely to kill you the same as an adult if the kid uses a gun to commit a crime... hesitation gets cops killed so people need to teach their children better.

If the police officer is tried, there's no way reasonable people would rule he murdered the boy when the boy was intimidating folks enough to call police and he failed to drop the gun when police arrived and he pointed it at the officer.

 

[Dee]

Homicide to the medical examiner just means that he was shot by someone else and that the gunshot wound was not self-inflicted.  It is not a matter of determining whether the gunshot was justified. There's a high probability this officer will not be indicted, and will be allowed to continue on as an officer.

 

[Dee]

The officer had other ways of assessing the situation and/or approaching the threat directly, VERY closely. He decided to put himself in harms way immediately and continued to follow this child at a very close proximity. Why couldn't he have stayed behind the cruiser door? Why couldn't he have been inside the cruiser and waited until he knew there was an immediate deadly threat as opposed to finding out it was a toy gun after the fact? Training, that's why. Shoot to kill--nothing more, nothing less.

 

[Jazzy]

To be clear, homicide doesn't mean murder, it means death by intentional means. A medical examiner will use this term specifically if the death was caused by another person, whether it is by negligence, murder, or a justified homicide. The fact the news is putting this article online is just to fuel the flames of the story.

 

[Dee]

Actually, the officer did not have other options available to him.  When the kid did not follow the orders of the police and they believed he had a real gun, which he pointed right at them, there is one action for the cops to take, and that option is shooting the target that, to the best of their knowledge, is a dangerous perpetrator with a working, loaded gun.
Cops can not take guesses, they can't assume things; they have to go on what they see, and in this case, what they saw was a man with a gun, which was pointed at them.

"Going on what they see" is in fact an assumption. It is an assumption that they make about the suspect given their training. It all can be traced back to they way they are trained, which is shoot to kill and ask questions later. I personally feel the officer did have other options, but this is a matter of opinions in a society that has allowed police officers to shoot whoever they deem necessary regardless of what the truth is.

 

[Dee]

Actually, the officer did not have other options available to him.  When the kid did not follow the orders of the police and they believed he had a real gun, which he pointed right at them, there is one action for the cops to take, and that option is shooting the target that, to the best of their knowledge, is a dangerous perpetrator with a working, loaded gun.
Cops can not take guesses, they can't assume things; they have to go on what they see, and in this case, what they saw was a man with a gun, which was pointed at them.

"Going on what they see" is in fact an assumption.  It is an assumption that they make about the suspect given their training.  It all can be traced back to they way they are trained, which is shoot to kill and ask questions later.  I personally feel the officer did have other options, but this is a matter of opinions in a society that has allowed police officers to shoot whoever they deem necessary regardless of what the truth is.

Going on what they see is the only thing they have.  If it looks like a duck and it quacks like a duck, it's probably a duck.  Yeah, it is how they are trained, that if they are pulling out their gun, they don't wound, they kill.  And sweeping blanket judgments on all cops based on the actions of a few is rather defeatist.

What other options do you think this cop had?

I named a few in a previous post. Please scroll up to see them. You've already disagreed with me on them, however, so I feel it's pointless to repeat them.

 

[Jazzy]

The officer had other ways of assessing the situation and/or approaching the threat directly, VERY closely.  He decided to put himself in harms way immediately and continued to follow this child at a very close proximity.  Why couldn't he have stayed behind the cruiser door?  Why couldn't he have been inside the cruiser and waited until he knew there was an immediate deadly threat as opposed to finding out it was a toy gun after the fact?  Training, that's why.  Shoot to kill--nothing more, nothing less.

What's missing here is that there were people in that park. People who were concerned enough to call the police when they saw someone brandishing a gun. Those people didn't know it was a toy. There were afraid for their own lives.

In your scenario, if he had behind the cruiser door or waited inside the cruiser, what's to stop this person with a gun to start shooting at people in the park?

He decided to give this kid a chance. He told him twice to put the gun down. Did he? No. He took aim at the officer. This kid would still be alive if he had listened to that officer. Sorry, the actions this kid decided to take, ended his life. The officer didn't end his life, HE DID.

 

[Dee]

The officer had other ways of assessing the situation and/or approaching the threat directly, VERY closely.  He decided to put himself in harms way immediately and continued to follow this child at a very close proximity.  Why couldn't he have stayed behind the cruiser door?  Why couldn't he have been inside the cruiser and waited until he knew there was an immediate deadly threat as opposed to finding out it was a toy gun after the fact?  Training, that's why.  Shoot to kill--nothing more, nothing less.

What's missing here is that there were people in that park. People who were concerned enough to call the police when they saw someone brandishing a gun. Those people didn't know it was a toy. There were afraid for their own lives.

In your scenario, if he had behind the cruiser door or waited inside the cruiser, what's to stop this person with a gun to start shooting at people in the park?

He decided to give this kid a chance. He told him twice to put the gun down. Did he? No. He took aim at the officer. This kid would still be alive if he had listened to that officer. Sorry, the actions this kid decided to take, ended his life. The officer didn't end his life, HE DID.

Taser.  Bean bag gun. And before you tell me their potential fail rates to bring down a suspect, I already know that, so I don't need a reminder.  I still feel there were other choices that didn't have to be lethal.