Cleveland officer in Tamir Rice shooting 'did not know was kid': video

[Eugene]

Source: Reuters

U.S. | Tue Apr 25, 2017 | 6:37pm EDT

Cleveland officer in Tamir Rice shooting 'did not know was kid': video

By Kim Palmer | CLEVELAND

The partner of a Cleveland police officer who fatally shot 12-year-old Tamir Rice in 2014 said he "didn't know it was a kid" when he responded to an emergency call about an armed man at a park, according to video released on Tuesday.

Cleveland Police Department officer Frank Garmback, in a video of a police interview following the shooting of the African-American child, became emotional several times.

“I didn’t know it was a kid,” Garmback said as he covered his face with his hands in the video released by the Rice family's attorney Subodh Chandra.

The shooting by a white officer of Rice as he was playing with a replica gun that fired pellets was one of a string of killings that fueled protests against the use of deadly force by U.S. police, particularly against minorities.

Chandra released the video on Tuesday as part of the family's push to have both officers fired, calling them incompetent.

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Read more: http://www.reuters.com/article/us-ohio-police-shooting-idUSKBN17R2YV

[bettyellen]

1. People become emotional when they realize they've fucked up horribly and got caught

[Egnever]

2. I can believe he didn't know it was a kid

Doesn't make their actions any better.

[angrychair]

3. Well

He did shot him within 2 seconds of arriving at the scene, how did he even know who anyone was??

[Egnever]

4. That about sums it up.

[beam me up scottie]

5. It shouldn't matter, the cop had no idea whether Tamir was a threat.

He didn't even attempt to assess the situation, they pulled up and he shot that poor kid within seconds.

More information needs to be collected about police shootings but some of the data is disturbing:

Police are more likely to kill black men, study finds
By Ronnie Cohen

Are police officers more likely to shoot an African-American man than a white one?

A new analysis of death certificates calculates that black males were almost three times more likely than whites to die at the hands of U.S. police, but the study fails to fill gaping holes in national law-enforcement reports about deadly use of force.

Though white males accounted for the largest number, blacks were 2.8 times more likely to be killed by police than whites, the study found. And Hispanic men were 1.7 times more likely than whites to be killed by officers.

“The fact that there’s nearly a three-fold greater likelihood that a black man is going to die from lethal intervention as a white man is striking,” Buehler said in a phone interview.

http://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-police-casualties-idUSKBN1492OO

Racists like to cite the higher number of white deaths as 'proof' that cops don't have a racism problem but anyone who's been paying attention knows that isn't true.

Here's just one example:

The 12 key highlights from the DOJ’s scathing Ferguson report
By Mark Berman, Wesley Lowery
March 4, 2015 at 3:11 PM

Seven months after a white Ferguson police officer shot and killed an unarmed 18-year-old, the Justice Department has issued a searing report into policing and court practices in the Missouri city. Investigators determined that in “nearly every aspect of Ferguson’s law enforcement system,” African Americans are impacted a severely disproportionate amount. The report included racist e-mails sent by police and municipal court supervisors, repeated examples of bias in law enforcement and a system that seemed built upon using arrest warrants to squeeze money out of residents.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-nation/wp/2015/03/04/the-12-key-highlights-from-the-dojs-scathing-ferguson-report/

[Adrahil]

6. How could he?

He shot Tamir just seconds after arriving on the scene. The poor kid was still processing what the fuck was happening to him!