No Charges in Tamir Rice Slaying

It is not actually a shock to learn that the grand jury has declined charges against the officers involved in the shooting of 12-year-old Tamir Rice. True, there were apparently problems with the Cleveland Police Department uncovered by a DOJ investigation. True, there were questions about the fitness of the officer who fired, Tim Loehmann. And it was true that an Ohio judge determined that there was certainly probable cause to file charges without the inquiry of a grand jury.

But when the prosecutor in this process made public a few studies that found the shooting "objectively reasonable", what else was there to know? If the intention of the prosecutor was to establish that charges should be brought, but to exonerate the officers, why did he even bother? To share the blame for nothing happening?  I have opinions about that guy of course. (They are not good opinions.)

Don't Make This Great

So, I was pretty terse regarding the news in my last post, because I didn't even have words. (An earlier post in the way-past my bedtime zone was deleted as I mistakenly thought the BLM protest that was shot up was one of the many memorializing the death of Tamir Rice. I deleted it. The error is embarrassing and I'm totally admitting it.) The shocking thing is that the shooting of five demonstrators regarding another police shooting, of Jamar Clark, occurred on the eve of the charging of a police officer with the first degree murder of Laquan McDonald.

It took over four hundred days to charge an officer with the slaying of a 17-year old kid who had a three-inch knife who showed up and in 30 seconds put 16 bullets in a human being, and who was only stopped when he paused to reload, when that boy was as dead as dead can be.

This is not the America I cherish. This is something I am watching wondering how many terrible and shocking things occurred before we were even paying proper attention.

So when I see the kind of news that makes protesters in Irving, TX pace around armed outside a mosque, because of something that was in the news, or some damn idiot leaves a fake bomb outside a mosque in VA--I understand that words mean things, and there are stupidly ambitious people out there using words (and fake statistics)  in stupidly dangerous ways. Racism is our original sin, and xenophobia and religious bigotry are not terribly more creative.

This isn't "greatness". And this country can't be made great through these kinds of thuggish actions. And people who spread the kind of manure that let these violence-flowers blossom? Are just shit.

Objectively Reasonable

A year after the police slaying of Tamir Rice, a 12-year-old boy who was stunting with a pellet gun, two outside investigations found that the shooting of this child, a minor, with an apparent weapon not determined to be real, who was not given a moment of time to have the officers at the scene assess the degree of seriousness of the situation or even make a suggestion that the child disarm, all of which would be rational things to do if this boy's life mattered--were found to be "objectively reasonable".

If it is not considered reasonable for officers to make a valid threat assessment before going in firing, and if it is not objectionable that the child was considered guilty before being determined to be of low-risk, then we have an implausible amount of semantic elasticity regarding the meanings of "objectivity" and "reasonableness".

Ohio is an open-carry state. Having a weapon on one's person is not itself illegal. In the situation where a person is seen handling a gun, that alone, is--according to gun-havers' logic, not a sign they are fixing to do something with it--right? So why was the appearance of Tamir Rice holding what was apparently a firearm that might have been entirely lawful the reason for his untimely slaughter?

I fully expect the NRA to raise their voices on behalf of Tamir Rice's right to own and bear arms under our Constitution and not have his death be considered justifiable homicide simply because he was carrying. (Well, actually I don't.)

I do not think anyone should be happy with the reciprocal idea that people confronted with police officers on the scene should assume they've been given carte blanche to waste your ass anyway, so you should defend yourself, with violence if necessary against peace officers--note--I am being ironic. I know this would mean the downfall of civilization as we know it--which is why I think police orgs should probably actually discourage the thinking where "police presence"="gonna die" to people on the street.

This is why "Black Lives Matter" needs to be said far and wide. Because investigations just up and said a 12 year old boy was asking for it for playing John Wayne style with a pellet gun. Tamir Rice mattered more than the not even two seconds the cops gave him. Why wasn't first aid immediately rendered once he was down? What the hell? I don't see a way to be objectively reasonable and see these findings biased and unhelpful in every way.