A judge had recommended in June that there was probable cause to charge the officers, but independent reports ordered by McGinty’s office and released in October found that officer Timothy Loehmann was justified in shooting Rice.
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“It’s a classic case of police officers making unfounded assumptions coming in guns blazing before clarifying what’s really going on”, protester Thurman Wenzl said.
Forty percent of people killed by police in the country’s 60 biggest police departments were black, while the African-American population in those jurisdictions was 20 percent, according to activists that run the Mapping Police Violence project.
Rice’s family, which has filed a civil lawsuit in his death, has asked the US Justice Department to review McGinty’s handling of the grand jury, which they believe was manipulated to exonerate the officers, attorney Subodh Chandra said.
Law enforcement officials are given the benefit of the doubt in such cases.
“I think with all the concern that people are showing here and other places that the apparent complacency that police have developed over time – feeling sort of immune- that that may change”.
On Tuesday, about 50 people marched peacefully in front of the county courthouse in downtown Cleveland to protest the grand jury decision.
“It has nothing to do about the individual, whether rightness or wrongness of the police, or the child, or the family”, he said, pausing often as he searched for the next word to utter.
“As the video shows, Officer Loehmann shot my son in less than a second”, she wrote.
In the 911 call you hear a man telling the operator about Rice, who was sitting in a park with the pellet gun.
During a press conference Tuesday, Jackson insisted that regardless of what the grand jury believed about the young boy’s death a year ago, “it should not have happened”, repeating, “It should not have happened”.
Tamir was carrying what turned out to be a pellet gun.
When the grand jury decided not to indict these officers, the jury of public opinion was outraged.
Cuyahoga County prosecutor Tim McGinty described a “perfect storm of human error, mistakes and communications by all involved that day” – and said evidence considered by the grand jury “did not indicate criminal conduct by police”.
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“She has been cheated twice, first by the loss of her boy and second by the prosecutor”, Chandra said of Rice’s mother, Samaria Rice. “I saw the weapon in his hands coming out of his waistband and the threat to my partner and myself was real and active”, Loehmann told investigators.
