Tamir Rice was a 12-year-old black boy who was shot and killed by a white Cleveland police officer because he was playing with a toy gun. A dispatcher did not tell them the caller thought it was probably a child with a fake gun.
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Surveillance video released of the encounter show officer Timothy Loehmann exiting his patrol auto and immediately opening fire, striking Tamir. The jury did so in spite of the deeply unsettling circumstances, the Cleveland Police Department’s history of police brutality and Officer Loehmann’s troubled past. Tragically, this information was not given to the officers by dispatchers, according to a Guardian report.
The officers involved have yet to admit to any wrongdoing.
The settlement must be approved by a Cuyahoga County Probate Court judge before it is finalized.
If we follow the statistics reported by The Guardian, there were 1,134 deaths at the hands of law enforcement officers in 2015.
The family and estate of Tamir Rice will receive $6 million from the city of Cleveland under an agreement announced today.
It later emerged the boy, who died a day after the 2014 shooting, had been seen holding a replica gun that shoots plastic pellets. Jackson also acknowledged the difficulties faced by the Rice family.
I hope it’s not only the $6 million that Tamir’s relatives and their lawyers will receive from the City of Cleveland.
Last year, prosecutors decided not to bring charges against the two officers, concluding the fatal shooting a “perfect storm of human error”.
But Cleveland Police Patrolman Association President Steve Loomis can’t seem to let the family of Rice have closure.
“Although historic in financial terms, no amount of money can adequately compensate for the loss of a life”, the family’s attorneys said in a statement on Monday.
Loehmann and the other officers had asked the court to drop the lawsuit. Tamir’s father, Leonard Warner, was dismissed in February as a party to the lawsuit.
Katy Kostenko, a 19-year old resident of Cleveland, holds a sign in protest on December 29, 2015 in Cleveland, Ohio.
The shooting has been one of the cases nationwide of police responding with lethal force to incidents involving black residents. The 12-year-old black boy was fatally shot by a white rookie police officer while playing with a pellet gun outside a recreation center in 2014.
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According to Cleveland.com Chandra said, “Loomis’s continued posturing shows he and the union still don’t comprehend that the police division needs a cultural change-not hiring incompetents, better training, and greater accountability”.
