Grand Jury clearing of officers involved in Tamir Rice shooting indicative of how the system works

When you have high profile shootings where everyone tends to have an opinion and none seemed to be even slightly wishing to listen to the other sides, you get a well-thought out and programmed response from those whose job is to dispense equal justice within the law.  For those on the other side of that line, finding a reason to allow those officers a way out instead of jail is the only course of action they feel is best because of the situation that they find themselves in.  For those on the side of the line where voices are never heard and often ignored, the results is all the proof they need to demonize police , prosecutors and judges.  Both sides lack true conviction is making things right and neither wishes to see nothing but what they has deemed a clear victory.  In the end, no one wins, we all lose and none of us seem smart enough to know the difference.

From the prosecutor’s side having to work closely with the police, they tend not to wish to alienate the ever vigilant and powerful police unions as well as those closet Klan members who would love nothing better than to rid the world of inferior people that don’t think, act, dress or worship like them.  So the best and the brightest get together to determine how they can get their cake and eat it too.  They spend hours if not days, months and years trying to come up with a way to kill without having to be held responsible for killing.  In the article titled “Cleveland police officers cleared in Tamir Rice shooting: prosecutor” written for Reuters, the newest strategy is exposed.  The article reports that “a grand jury cleared two Cleveland police officers in the November 2014 fatal shooting of 12-year-old Tamir Rice, who was brandishing a toy gun in a park, due to a lack of evidence indicating criminal activity, a prosecutor said on Monday.  The grand jury for weeks had been hearing testimony on the shooting of Rice, which took place within seconds after police arrived at a park next to a Cleveland recreation center in response to reports of a suspect with a gun. Rice died the next day.  Rice was playing with a replica handgun outside a recreation center when Officer Timothy Loehmann shot him twice within seconds of reaching the park in a squad car driven by his partner, Frank Garmback.  "Simply put, given this perfect storm of human error, mistakes and miscommunication by all involved that day, the evidence did not indicate criminal conduct by police," Tim McGinty, the Cuyahoga County prosecutor, said in a statement mad to the media.  McGinty also called on makers of replica guns to do more to make them easier to distinguish from actual firearms.  What is this strategy you may ask and I shall answer if you did not detect it from what you just read then you too may be far too involved into this process of finding good versus evil in everything you see, but to answer your question it is simply the statement of “the evidence did not indicate criminal conduct by police”.  What this means is if you can show that no criminal action was done by police, they can now be found by any grand jury to be free of responsibility.  Watching the video, it is more than apparent that no criminal act was attempted as those officers drove directly toward and upon Tamir Rice.  This is not an action anyone wishing to commit a criminal act would do because actions that can be easily categorized as criminal are always done in secret or under the cover of darkness.  If it had truly been a man with a gun, they would have never drove up on an adult like they did that child.  So all any prosecutor has to do and any defense attorney is make sure that the grand jury entertains anything that does not reflect a criminal act and those who murdered can walk away scot-free.

For the family and false supporters side, the grand jury only hearing things that would lead anyone to assume no criminal act was committed by police is beneficial to them because now all the hateful rhetoric that they have been spewing will now appear justified to those that they have been trying so very hard to convince.  They have no desire to listen, learn and educate themselves with the truth because it does not fit their desires.  Tamir Rice lived in an poor neighborhood in a rough part of town, so whose bright idea was it to give him a replica of a gun as a toy?  Where were all of the so-called men whose task is to simply say something to a young male if they see him about to do or doing something that could land him in jail or in the graveyard?  Where are the parents and family members who are supposed to prepare our children for any possible encounter that they may come upon in life and where are the parents who laid down to bring this child into this world but refused to stand up and protect him?

Yes the officers were wrong to drive on the grass and approach anyone during a call such as that before they had a decent idea exactly what they were dealing with.  Yes the officer shot the kid pretty fast which leads me to think he had already un-holstered his weapon before he even got there.  Yes the officers acted very unprofessionally after the shooting walking all over the crime scene and the time that medical attention took as well as crime scene analyst was far too long to make clear the event.  Yes the dispatcher should have made clear that it was a little boy with a gun and possibly a toy gun to the officers long before they got there.  Yes all of these thigs should have happened but they didn’t And no matter how you wish to slant it, a criminal act was not what you saw when you watched the video.

What you saw was poorly trained police officers far to lazy to walk up to the scene and instead had to drive.  What you saw was an over-zealous officer who did not take the necessary 3 seconds to assess the situation before acting.  What you saw was a little boy missing others to play with and not having anyone there to keep him from aiming that toy at people or vehicles.  What you saw was someone’s idea of a break from another person child.  What you saw was a failure of not only the Black community but all communities as a whole because we are so self-absorbed that we could care less about anyone else unless that anyone is ourselves.  We have become so jaded that we could even care less about the children that we bring into this world if their existence interferes with our happiness.

The “not guilty” decision of the Tamir Rice grand jury proves beyond a doubt that our failures to right a crooked ship is coming back to bite us in the butt and as long as we refuse to address the situation head-on or blame everyone else for decisions we make, children will continue dying who really haven’t even had a chance to live. The only option left now is civil court but if we continue to see our children’s pain, suffering and death as nothing but an opportunity to get money then we are no better than the arrogant idiot who takes a life just because they think they can.