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Calm urged after Ohio grand jury doesn’t indict officers
Officials are urging calm as they brace for expected protests after a grand jury voted not to indict a white Cleveland police officer for fatally shooting a 12-year-old black boy who was playing with what turned out to be a pellet gun. A prosecutor said that there was no criminal activity in the incident.
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McGinty said there were errors by officers and the police dispatcher and it would be “unreasonable” for officers Timothy Loehmann and Frank Garmback to have waited to see if Tamir Rice’s gun was real or not.
According to ABC News, the prosecutor told journalists that Loehmann, an officer-in-training, had reason to feel threatened as Tamir reached for his gun when the police auto was approaching.
Rashad Robinson, executive director of ColorOfChange, one of the largest online civil rights organizations, said in a statement that the decision shows that Cuyahoga County Prosecutor Timothy McGinty, “doesn’t honor Black life or seek to hold officers accountable”. Mr Loehmann and Mr Garmback were responding to a call to the emergency dispatcher about a “guy” pulling a gun out of his pants and pointing it at people.
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.
Cuyahoga County prosecutor Tim McGinty said it was “indisputable” that the boy was drawing the weapon from his waistband when he was gunned down – either to hand it over to police or to show them that it wasn’t a real firearm.
Relatives of 12-year-old Tamir Rice say they’re disappointed but not surprised that a grand jury declined to indict the officer who fatally shot him outside a Cleveland recreation center last year.
“We and our brothers and sisters in Cleveland demand justice for 12-year-old Tamir Rice… But it was not, by the law that binds us, a crime”.
Tamir was carrying what turned out to be a pellet gun, but one without the telltale orange tip that would mark it as replica.
But the officers were told to investigate a report of someone with a gun scaring people outside the center.
McGinty says he put the case before a grand jury so the evidence would be reviewed not only by a prosecutor but also by a panel of citizens who would make the final call on whether charges were merited.
The officers were “frightened” and did not realize that Rice – who was tall for his age – was just a boy with a toy, McGinty said.
While supporting the Cleveland police officers from Ohio, McGinty said that both the guns looked functionally identical and hence both Loehmann and Garmback may have mistaken it to be real.
There was no immediate comment from Loehmann or his partner, who was not charged either.
A grainy surveillance-camera video of the boy’s November 2014 shooting provoked outrage nationally, and together with other killings of black people by police in places such as Ferguson, Mo., and New York City, it helped fuel the Black Lives Matter movement.
In detailing the decision not to bring charges, McGinty said police radio personnel contributed to the tragedy by failing to pass along the “all-important fact” that the 911 caller said the gunman was probably a juvenile and the gun probably wasn’t real.
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The announcement brings to an end a criminal investigation that catapulted Cleveland into the national debate about police use of deadly force and placed McGinty and his office in the crosshairs of local activists. “It should never happen again, and the city has taken steps so it doesn’t”. In circumstances like this, when police brutality has become a plight in the United States, the jury’s decision wasn’t entirely unexpected. Jackson was responding to questions about the Cuyahoga County Grand Jury decisio…