Two investigators hired by the Cuyahoga
County Prosecutor’s Office separately found the Nov. 22 Cleveland Police shooting of 12-year-old Tamir Rice “reasonable,” according to the prosecutor.
The investigations by Colorado prosecutor S. Lamar Sims and retired FBI agent Kimberly A. Crawford found that Cleveland Police Officer Timothy Loehmann acted reasonably
when he shot Rice seconds after jumping out of the passenger side of a patrol car while Rice played with a toy gun in a park.
“The relevant inquiry is whether a reasonable officer, confronting the exact same scenario under identical conditions could have concluded that deadly force was necessary,” Crawford wrote in her report about the investigation.
The report notes that Loehmann had no way of knowing that the gun Rice was playing with was a toy. A 911 call from a nearby resident mentions that the gun “is probably fake,” but that information was not relayed to officers by the dispatcher.
Video footage of the shooting shows Rice playing near a park shelter, sometimes pointing the toy pistol, other times simply walking back and forth. He does not appear to have the gun in hand when police arrive.
“Officer Loehmann’s belief that Rice posed a threat of serious physical harm or death was objectively reasonable as was his response to that perceived threat,” Sims, the Colorado prosecutor, writes in his report.
The report comes as a grand jury considers charges against Loehmann and as activists in Cleveland and around the country demand answers for the shooting.
Activists say police should never have pulled their cruiser so close to Rice and that he was not given enough time to react to verbal commands before he was shot. In the investigators’ report, Sims called these criticisms “Monday morning quarterbacking.”
Activists also criticize Loehmann and his partner, officer Frank Garmback, for not rendering medical aid to Rice after shooting him and for Loehmann’s presence on the Cleveland police force in the first place. The officer had been previously dismissed from another police force outside of Cleveland after being deemed unfit for duty. Loehmann also failed an entrance exam for the Cuyahoga County Sheriff’s Department.
Cuyahoga County Prosecutor Timothy McGinty has said grand jury deliberations over the incident are ongoing and that the reports don’t necessarily mean Loehmann won’t be charged in Rice’s death. McGinty also invited the Rice family to submit their own reports from experts.
This article appears in Oct 14-20, 2015.