If you pull a gun out and start raising it toward a cop, even in an open carry state, you are most likely going to get shot.
Again, in the original video, this part wasn’t evident, but it was in the higher resolution version. The first video in this list talks about what was seen, and it is much more detailed than what was originally reported in the media.
Again, this is not an excuse to not have a trial, but the suggestions that have been made that the cops actions were unreasonable may be mistaken.
Are you including in “cops actions” their decision to drive right up to him? Because I really don’t see how that was, in any way, reasonable given the call that they were responding to.
I have seen the video and heard endless commentary on it - it’s practically been on loop over here (I am in Cleveland at the moment). It is still quite grainy, and it doesn’t seem evident that he is raising the gun toward the officers. Likewise, I don’t know what actually happened. I am not trying to hang the officers. That same lack of clarity works both ways. All I truly know is what I can make out, and none of it is good.
Oh I’ll grant you that random idiots do random things. Your phrasing just made it sound like you thought that particular FUD would be normal and widespread in an open carry state. That’s false.
Well, actually, it doesn’t show anything of the sort with any additional clarity, but the “expert” certainly helpfully captioned everything that way to lead folks to this conclusion.
In any event, it was the driver of the car who put Loehmann in the “regretful” position of having to kill a citizen rather than face the potential of a risk of not making it home for dinner.
I think the Prosecutor was right in that no crime was committed. It’s clear that the officer could reasonably have feared for his life when the child reached for the toy.
The problem defies the applicable laws. These cops were extremely aggressive, though nobody appeared to be in any danger when the encounter began. They escalated the situation. They made only a token attempt to communicate with the child “DROP THE GU… [bang].” Tamir Rice was dead the moment the driver of that car decided to drive up to him and create the danger which was then used to defend the killing.
This will go on until police training puts more emphasis on deescalation than “neutralizing the threat.” It may also take police acknowledgement that defending their own lives remains important, but civilian lives are also important. I believe this is possible. Some police do deescalate, and some do consider alternatives other than “KILL IT RIGHT NOW.” I don’t know whether the difference is personality, training or some mix of both, but I hope someone in law enforcement is out there trying to understand it and adjust police hiring and procedure accordingly.
Actually, when you watch the video you can see quite clearly that he pulls it out of the waistband of his pants just as the cops pull up. It doesn’t require any captioning to see it.
But they have no reason to actually pursue this training. They have a get out of jail free card. Even you say there was no crime committed. This will never change until someone actually gets punished for the action. What’s their incentive, public outcry? There’s already a lot of that.
I agree with Nesrie. If you want to argue that there was no crime here then what you are advocating is that the police can willfully create a situation that then results in the killing of a civilian with no consequence. “It’s coming right for us” may get laughs in South Park but it should not be a permissible police tactic that results in the death of a civilian with no consequence.
This situation was created entirely by the aggressive actions of the police. By entirely I do mean 100% because the child in question was breaking no laws. The officers in question willfully, knowingly and recklessly placed themselves in harms way and less than two seconds later they shot a kid. I also find it very disturbing that they lied about them warning the victim prior to shooting him. It could not have happened since the car windows were rolled up and there was not enough time before they shot him. That indicates to me that they knew they had messed up.
Maybe it doesn’t make the news, but it is disappointing to see the police brass getting a slide on most of these incidents. You can try (and apparently fail most of the time) to hold the individual line cops accountable, but real change is going to require the brass to make systemic changes. We rarely hear anything about firings or demotions at the executive level in these problematic forces.
Voters can address this. Governors, mayors, prosecutors and aldermen are elected officials. For that matter, so are many judges.
I’m not saying change could happen soon, or that it will happen at all. But there is a mechanism for accountability. Local and off-year elections need higher voter participation by people who aren’t some combination of old, white and well off. The lines for those elections usually look like the cast from Cocoon.
No. You misunderstand my point. I am saying that the police can willfully create the danger that justifies killing children (or anyone else) under current law and procedure. That’s not advocacy. That’s just explanation. You can understand how laws work and simultaneously think they are bad policy.
This shit has to change, but it won’t change until voters start firing mayors, prosecutors and the like who run on “Tough on crime!” platforms.
There also needs to be a better way of finding out about these candidates. I have a hard time tracking when these are, and finding out about the candidates. And I’m someone who spends effort to find out about them. But with no local newspaper for my town (a town of 20,000 that directly borders the City of Chicago) it’s nearly impossible. Local government is a black box.
Judges and such up for reelection are nearly always a formality. With the dozens of cook county judges up for election each time, often unopposed, how do you deal with this? Short of getting caught up in a major scandal we have no way of hearing about bad judges or prosecutors.
That’s a great point. It’s difficult for even motivated voters to learn the platform of a judge, prosecutor or the like. It seems like the sort of thing that could be addressed by some combination of community activism and social media. But we don’t see much of that happening, so there must be some serious barriers.
Yeah most of my local elections are single candidate. Even with a lot of research I doubt there would be a reasonable way for me to find out if my mayor is going to back a police officer who puts himself or herself in danger just to claim they felt they were in danger later as reason for killing a child. Don’t get me wrong. I have a lot of respect for the service police officers provide, and I realize they put themselves in danger when no one else will all the time. The problem is if it’s a choice between a 12 year old making perfect decisions every day in order not to be killed or a police officer practicing good judgment realizing the ideal outcome is no one dies, I’m putting the responsibility on the trained and armed adult.
The problem is, when that doesn’t happen, there’s zero consequences it seems in most of this country. And because of that, I don’t think it will be get better on it’s own or with asking nicely. I also don’t think waiting decades in the hopes that the voting public can vet out good candidates is a good solution. We might need to push to change laws so that when an officer puts themselves in danger they cannot automatically claim danger as a reason for killing someone. That doesn’t mean auto-guilt, but something that puts pressure on the prosecutor to do more than just take the officers feels as a reason for killing.
