On Monday, December 28, less than a week before Rev. Traci Blackmon starts a new national position with the United Church of Christ in Cleveland, the Cleveland police officer who shot and killed 12-year-old Tamir Rice was told he would face no charges.
Cuyahoga County Prosecutor Timothy McGinty announced that a grand jury had decided not to charge Officer Timothy Loehmann, who shot and killed the youth playing with a toy gun outside a recreation center, or his training partner, Officer Frank Garmback. McGinty said he agreed with the grand jury’s conclusion that it was reasonable for Loehmann to think the toy gun was real and to fear for his life.
Blackmon – who came to national prominence as a frontline clergy supporter at Ferguson protests, and then as a member of the Ferguson Commission – wasted no time showing bold leadership in Cleveland before she even officially reports for duty.
With Rev. Michael McBride of PICO National Network, Blackmon released a stinging statement rejecting the grand jury’s decision and calling for the immediate termination of Loehmann and Garmback and a Department of Justice investigation of McGinty.
There was no point to call for a DOJ probe of the Cleveland Police Department. One was underway when Tamir Rice was killed on November 22, 2014. The DOJ report, released less than two weeks after Rice’s killing, outlined a “pattern or practice of the use of excessive force” by the department and “inadequate training” consistent with the hasty, violent police work that ended in the boy’s death.
Blackmon spoke with The American on Tuesday, December 29. The mother of two young black men said she had cried through the night and was at times still choked with emotion while discussing the verdict.
“It shows you can have a video, and it doesn’t matter. Someone can call and say they think it’s a child and it’s only a toy, and it doesn’t matter. It shows it can be an open carry state, and it doesn’t matter,” Blackmon said.
“It shows that if you are black people in a poor environment, it automatically increases your chances for disaster and death. That’s hard to swallow as a black mom.”
Like everyone engaged with issues of police violence, Blackmon viewed the decision not to charge the officers for Rice’s death in the context of many past cases where officers were not charged for killing an unarmed black person.
“Adults die, we fight for them, and have no success. Teens die, we fight for them, and have no success. Even in cases with civil suits where millions are paid out, we still have no success and get no justice,” Blackmon said.
“Now, it’s a 12-year-old who is dead, and we have to say, once again, we were powerless to protect him. It’s a lot. It’s a lot, especially for black mothers with black boys, and I have two of those.”
The defiant tone of her demands to fire the police officers and investigate the prosecutor was gone, for the moment, replaced with raw hurt.
“What you hear is a mixture of desperation and trying to come back from a feeling of hopelessness,” she said. “It’s just too much. Just too much.”
It was a range of devastating emotions felt throughout the movement and Black America. The pain comes down to the youth of the boy killed within seconds of when the officers drove up on him as he played in the park.
“We’re talking about a little boy. He may be big for his age, but he was a baby, 12 years old,” Blackmon said. “Before the officer was fully out of the car, he was shooting. We have to deal with that. It’s migrated to an assault on children.”
In her grief, Blackmon started an online petition drive calling for a new grand jury to consider the case. It quickly crested 40,000 signatures. She was already finding thousands of new allies for the work ahead of her in Cleveland.
“Tamir was killed in Cleveland, and we have our national office there, so we will be a very visible and prominent voice,” she said – “in concert with leadership on the ground, in many ways we will follow them, but we will add our voice.”
She said the United Church of Christ welcomed her bold leadership on the issue as she steps into her new national role as executive of UCC Justice and Witness Ministries.
“We had a conversation before I took this job, where I said very candidly, ‘This is who I am,’ and I was told, ‘That is why we want you here, because this is who you are,’” she said.
“I don’t think the things I am saying are in any way antithetical to the gospel. Sometimes people take what I say to mean I hate the police. I don’t hate the police. I hate injustice.”
