T
hree hundred and sixty-four days after a Cleveland police officer shot and killed 12-year-old Tamir Rice, a group of about 60 people gathered in a cold, driving rain at the Hamilton County Courthouse.
Over a megaphone, organizers of the Nov. 21 demonstration addressed the crowd and a few beleaguered-looking TV news cameramen. An imam for a mosque in Clifton also spoke, as did representatives from local unions, a feminist group and others.
The diverse group gathered in solidarity with events in Cleveland and around the country remembering Rice, who was shot by officer Timothy Loehmann last year. The shooting has become yet another point of protest among activists decrying the deaths of unarmed blacks at the hands of law enforcement, often without charges for the officers involved. Activists say the lack of penalties for some officers and long waits for the trials of others are another grave injustice heaped atop the killings themselves.
A 911 call identified Rice as a child and indicated that the toy pistol he was playing with at a playground near his home was “probably fake.” But those details reportedly didn’t reach Loehmann, who shot Rice only seconds after emerging from the passenger side of a police cruiser that had pulled within feet of the child. Video footage shows the incident, but it is unclear whether officers ordered Rice to put his hands up, as Loehmann later claimed. Neither Loehmann nor his partner administered medical aid to Rice, who died shortly afterward.
“Unfortunately, justice for Tamir would be for him to be here,” activist Christina Brown told the crowd. “Tamir would be alive. He’d be 13. He recently had a birthday. Today we want to humanize Tamir, to amplify his voice, but also ensure that he is the last one. We have to believe that we live in a world where that can happen.”
Rice’s shooting happened just weeks before the Department of Justice released the scathing results of an 18-month investigation into the Cleveland Police Department’s use of force.
“We have concluded that we have reasonable cause to believe that CPD engages in a pattern or practice of the use of excessive force in violation of the Fourth Amendment of the United States Constitution,” the report states.
A grand jury convened by Cuyahoga County Prosecutor Timothy McGinty has yet to indicate whether it will seek charges against Loehmann. In the meantime, McGinty has commissioned what he calls independent studies of the incident from three former law enforcement professionals. All found Loehmann’s actions reasonable, saying the officer had no way of knowing whether Rice was a threat or not.
But there are questions about the objectivity of those investigations. Retired FBI training specialist Kimberly A. Crawford issued one of those reports. Attorneys for Rice’s family have pointed out that Crawford’s arguments for the acceptability of other law enforcement shootings have been rejected by the Department of Justice for being too lenient to officers. Another investigator, Denver District Deputy Attorney S. Lamar Sims, has made previous statements in support of Loehmann’s actions before undertaking his study.
“Clearly, a year later, he has no interest in even calling for a trial for a cop who killed a 12-year-old boy in less time than it takes you to take a deep breath,” Cincinnati Black Lives Matter activist Brian Taylor said of prosecutor McGinty at the rally.
A March court filing from the city of Cleveland stated that Rice was responsible for his death, saying it was caused by “failure to exercise due care to avoid injury.”
The city later apologized for the wording of the legal document.
“In an attempt to protect all of our defenses, we used words and we phrased things in such a way that was very insensitive,” Cleveland Mayor Frank G. Jackson said at a news conference. “Very insensitive to tragedy in general, the family and the victim in particular.”
While the Rice family’s attorneys cite these moves by the city and prosecutor McGinty as reasons to move the grand jury deliberations outside Cuyahoga County, McGinty has said that his office and the grand jury are impartial and have yet to reach any conclusions about the case.
As they deliberate, the voices calling for answers have gotten louder. Among them is U.S. Rep. Marcia Fudge, a Democrat who represents Cleveland. Fudge issued a statement Nov. 22 saying the case was taking “far too long.”
In Cleveland, many turned out for three days of events and protests. Those included a vigil attended by Rice’s family on Nov. 22, the one-year anniversary of the shooting. More than 100 crowded the snow-speckled grass of the Cudell Recreation Center, where Rice was shot, singing songs and holding candles as 12 doves, one for each year of Rice’s short life, were freed to fly into the gray sky.
“One year later, and everybody is still here,” said Eugene Rice, Tamir’s grandfather.
Meanwhile, in Cincinnati, protesters spent about an hour at the courthouse before treading wet streets in a march through Over-the-Rhine. A sense of déjà vu set in — marches along a similar route sprang up almost exactly a year earlier, when a grand jury declined to indict Ferguson, Mo., police officer Darren Wilson in the shooting death of unarmed black 18-year-old Michael Brown.
That incident came just days after an officer-involved killing in Beavercreek, Ohio, in which Beavercreek police officer Sean Williams shot John Crawford III of Fairfield while he held a toy gun in an aisle at Walmart. Security footage, released after weeks of delay, shows Crawford facing a shelf with the pellet rifle slung over his shoulder when officers appear in the frame and shoot him. A grand jury declined to indict Williams in that shooting.
On the day of the march, Brown had been dead for 470 days. Crawford had been dead for 474.
Brown’s death last year began a difficult national reckoning with racially charged police shootings in America. But increased awareness and conversation about those shootings have done little thus far to stop them.According to data culled by journalists at British publication The Guardian, more than 1,000 people have been killed in officer-involved shootings in the United States this year, including 30 in Ohio, the seventh-most of any state. Blacks are twice as likely as whites to die in those incidents. While a good number of those deaths came from armed confrontations, many others involved unarmed citizens.
The national struggle over those shootings has come home to Cincinnati on more than one occasion. This summer, University of Cincinnati police officer Ray Tensing shot and killed unarmed black motorist Samuel DuBose in Mount Auburn.
DuBose had been dead 104 days as protesters marched through OTR. Officer Tensing has been charged with murder for the shooting, but a trial date has not yet been set.
“I’m fired up,” said marcher Rosemary Parker. “I am angry, because I watched police brutality growing up and it’s a damn shame it’s still going on today. I’m a mother of four and a grandmother of five. If changes don’t come, my grandbabies are going to be enduring this.”On their way to Washington Park, protesters passed just a few hundred feet from the spot where 19-year-old unarmed black man Timothy Thomas was shot by Cincinnati Police officer Stephen Roach on a warm night in April, 2001, igniting days of civil unrest throughout downtown and OTR.That unrest eventually led to federal oversight and reform of the Cincinnati Police Department. Officer Roach was charged with negligent homicide for the shooting, but was later acquitted. The day of the march, Thomas had been dead 5,337 days. ©
