Over 400 days after Officer Timothy Loehmann opened fire on Tamir Rice in a Cleveland playground, killing the 12-year-old boy, Cuyahoga County prosecutor Timothy McGinty announced no charges will be laid.
Tragically, I can only echo the words of Tamir’s family who expressed their complete lack of surprise that no charges are to be brought against the men who opened fire on a child in a playground less than two seconds after arriving on the scene.
Tamir Rice’s murder and the obfuscation, delays, mishandling and leaks that followed in the year since “fit the description” of so many police killings in this country that despite a yearning to believe that in this egregious case some scrap of justice might be found, it’s been obvious that these men – and the towering system of white supremacy behind them – would never face a day in court, let alone a minute in jail.
Should the cold-blooded, split-second execution of a child in a playground not be enough to jolt the conscience of those who seek to discredit or downplay the black life matters movement, consider that neither officer deigned to check on the dying child, or administer CPR.
Consider the brutalization of Tamir’s 14-year-old sister as her baby brother lay dying, the slanderous remarks McGinty has consistently made to the media, smearing Tamir’s family and joining the City of Cleveland in blaming the dead 12 year old himself for his murder.
Consider the series of reports commissioned and publically released ahead of the grand jury’s decision by McGinty, written by highly questionable “experts” and ex parte “exonerating” the officers. Consider the cynical decision to keep this family and community in a torturous limbo for more than a year, then wait until the height of the holiday season to make an announcement in an attempt to bury the story.
In June, Cleveland municipal court judge Ronald Adrine found probable cause to prosecute Loehmann with murder, manslaughter, reckless homicide and negligent homicide and probable cause for a charge of negligent homicide against Officer Frank Garmback, yet these recommendations were handed back to the former Ohio Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association’s Prosecutor of the Year, McGinty, who disregarded them.
In another page from the apparently standard issue “How to Kill a Black Boy” manual, Loehmann had already been declared unfit for duty in 2010, when his former deputy chief and others deemed him emotionally unstable, emphasizing his “dangerous loss of composure,” especially in regards to the use of firearms, and recommended he be fired. Instead, Loehmann quit and was hired by the Cleveland Police, a department already under federal investigation over the use of excessive force, including unreasonable deadly force.
The Justice Department report, released just a week after the killing of Tamir, was predictably scathing, attesting to patterns of excessive force, commonplace abuse of Constitutional rights, habitual use of guns on people who did not pose an immediate threat, the overuse of tasers, the use of tasers on subdued or handcuffed suspects, and cited the city for failing to adequately investigate and discipline officers involved in using excessive force.
Given how completely Cleveland officials have betrayed Tamir Rice, his family and his community at every step of this so-called investigation, calls for the Department of Justice Civil Rights Division to investigate seem clearly warranted. Sadly, the track record of this federal team has been to add insult to injury. They failed to find grounds to prosecute the man who murdered Trayvon Martin, they failed to find grounds to prosecute the man who murdered Michael Brown Jr.
The further miscarriage of justice we have witnessed in Cleveland provides the frankly toothless Department of Justice paper tiger with another opportunity to prove their worth. I challenge the Department of Justice, yet again, to do their job.
Reverend Osagyefo Sekou is Bayard Rustin Fellow with the Fellowship of Reconciliation.
