A year after the murder of 12 year old Tamir Rice – this baby, our child – by Cleveland police officers, the state has not even bothered to put up a pretense of fair process, instead making it explicit that justice does not apply to black people in this country, not even to black children.
Rogue prosecutors and bad laws give police carte blanche to kill with impunity. The brutality continues, the hashtags roll on, and a system designed to crush us continues to work as designed. But from Ferguson to Baltimore to Texas to Minneapolis to Oakland to Cleveland and beyond, people continue to resist, to rise up, to join together in beloved community and speak truth to power.
Tamir Rice was shot dead less than two seconds after Officers Timothy Loehmann and Frank Garmback hurtled towards a park at high speed, weapons drawn. The officers clearly decided to shoot to kill first, investigate later. After opening fire on Tamir, they failed to give any medical assistance, instead focusing on brutalizing Tamir’s teenage sister.
The glaring delays and gaps in the official investigation, the absence of any decision a full year later, and the highly unprofessional and plainly biased way Prosecutor McGinty has approached his role leads us to the sadly inevitable conclusion that the case will never see a court of law. Prosecutor Timothy McGinty has thus far commissioned and publicized three reports using highly questionable “experts” exonerating the officers and even gone so far as to join the City of Cleveland in blaming Tamir for his own death.
Much of this is a tragic repeat of the deeply flawed, unprofessional and biased way St. Louis Prosecutor Robert McCulloch neglected to make a case to a grand jury after Officer Darren Wilson shot and killed Michael Brown Jr. in August 2014. The role of the prosecutor is to present charges based on “probable cause.”
The abdication of responsibility – such as McCulloch’s information dump, his presentation of witnesses he knew to be perjuring themselves or McGinty’s role as pseudo-defense lawyer – merely confirms that this is not confined to a bad cop or a forgotten town, but is a deep-seated problem of systemic racism that must be rooted out at the core.
Reverend Osagyefo Sekou is the Bayard Rustin Fellow with the Fellowship of Reconciliation.
