Charles Pierce: How the Cleveland PD's Shooting of Tamir Rice Was Supposed to Work

[eridani]

http://readersupportednews.org/opinion2/277-75/30330-how-the-cleveland-pds-shooting-of-tamir-rice-was-supposed-to-work

Back in May, a Cleveland police officer named Timothy Loehmann rolled up on a 12-year old boy named Tamir Rice, who was in a public park with an air rifle. In less than a minute, Loehmann sized up the situation and shot the boy to death. And today, thanks to Shaun King at Daily Kos, we learn that the first impulse of the Cleveland P.D. was to charge the dead boy with crimes. And, if there wasn't video, they would have gotten away with it.

Recently obtained documents from the Cleveland Police Department, displayed below, show that Tamir Rice was going to be charged with the outrageous crimes of "aggravated menacing" and "inducing panic."

This should embarrass any sentient primate. The officers involved in the killing of Tamir Rice took less than a minute to kill him and considerably more time concocting the preposterous cover story that, in less than a minute, they felt so "menaced," and so much "panic" had been "induced" in them that Rice had to be put down like a dog. What are these especially delicate blossoms doing in the police business in the first place? This is the kind of thing that was supposed to be the point of the hearings before the House Judiciary Committee this week. Not merely the hairtrigger response of an incompetent cop, but the conditioned reflex inbred in too many of them to cover up their crimes. That is not a "problem" among some bad apples. That impulse drives a culture of deadly

[ManiacJoe]

1. The charges might be reasonable, but

the tactics for the arrest were fucked from the start.

[MisterP]

2. is this anything like gay panic? Black panic? tallish-12-year-old panic?

even then they'd have to account for the fact that Rice did all this in, what, 4 seconds?

[Damansarajaya]

3. Actually, it wasn't a rifle--it was an airsoft pistol

which did look real.

But that's no reason for what they did. They should have approached from a safe distance and asked the suspect to put the gun down.

If they really feared for their lives, why did the drive up to within yards of the suspect?

It's the same crap we got from Zimmerman and Wilson: "I was in fear for my life, so I chased the suspect." You can't have it both ways--if one is really in fear of mortal danger from a suspect, they shouldn't be chasing and confronting said suspect.

"After I hit him with this pipe wrench, the other guy became enraged so I had to kill him. I was in fear for my life."