A Cleveland grand jury declined Monday to bring charges in the death of Tamir Rice, a black youth with a toy gun who was shot by a white police officer 13 months ago.
Advertisement
“Public safety – everywhere – requires trust between law enforcement and the communities they are sworn to protect”, Gray said in the statement.
The protesters, huddled under the cement roof outside the Jackson Square T stop, also targeted police brutality more broadly.
Following the long-awaited announcement, the Rice’s attorney, Subodh Chandra, said that the family was “saddened and disappointed” but definitely not “surprised” by the outcome.
“R.I.P. Tamir Rice” is written on a block of wood near a memorial for Rice outside the Cudell Recreation Center, Tuesday, Dec. 29, 2015, in Cleveland.
“There’s been lots of cases where he [President Obama] goes out and calls for an investigation and it turns out there’s nothing there; not civil rights violations or any of the civil violations that he had jurisdiction over”, he said.
“These are things he’ll never have a chance to play with”, Taylor said.
“Everybody has this vision of a cold, callous person who shot a 12-year-old”, Hilow said.
Cleveland Mayor Frank Jackson made a similar plea as police set up metal barricades outside the Justice Centre after Mr McGinty’s press conference. Officers in both of those killings were cleared of criminal charges by grand juries. While prosecutors have a responsibility to get at the truth, they should not be playing jury.
Before police arrived, the youngster was seen repeatedly drawing the gun from his waistband and pointing it at other children, Meyer said.
He says there’s some legitimacy in that.
In the eyes of Cleveland officials defending that city in the Rice killing, Sims’ long record of deciding that police-killings are “reasonable” presumably helped qualify him as an expert witness – a hired gun who helped the officer walk free.
Lawyers for the Rice family also called on people to express themselves “peacefully and democratically”. McGinty said Tamir was trying to either hand the weapon over to police or show them it wasn’t real, but the officer and his partner had no way of knowing that.
The attorney for Loehmann, Henry Hilow, said critics created a national dialogue about the shooting that don’t match the facts about what the officers knew.
Tamir was carrying what turned out to be a pellet gun when an officer shot and killed the boy within two seconds of emerging from his police cruiser in November 2014.
“The two officers could have foreseen that their decision, and the actions they took, as they drove into the park to confront Tamir, and the inadequate assessment shooting him within two seconds of arrival, would cause his death”, Johnson wrote.
Advertisement
Protesters are expected to gather outside Cleveland’s downtown justice center Tuesday afternoon.
