Plain Dealer: Why we turned off comments on Tamir Rice news stories [View all]

[HughBeaumont]

Likely because inviting 1,000 more creative ways to say "I hate (insert racial slur here)s" kinda gets old after a while.

And, unironically, the comments ARE turned on for this article, in case you wanted to see just how many Klansmen and AB members exist here in Northeast Ohio.

So why, a lot of you have asked, have we chosen to turn off all comments on stories about Tamir Rice?

The simple answer is that we don't fancy our website as a place of hate, and the Tamir Rice story has been a magnet for haters.

We tried to maintain the conversation. The Tamir Rice case offers lessons for Greater Cleveland, and hashing out those lessons in an online community forum could be a healthy exercise. A lot of people firmly believe the police broke the law when they shot Tamir, but others feel just as strongly that the shooting was justified. Passions are strong, and because our comments section could provide a place for venting, we allowed comments on Tamir stories for months. We enlisted a small army on our staff to monitor the comments and delete any that violated our standards.

The trouble was that we couldn't keep up. Just about every piece we published about Tamir immediately became a cesspool of hateful, inflammatory or hostile comments. Rather than discuss the facts of the case, many commenters debased the conversation with racist invective. Or they made absurd statements about the clothing and appearance of people involved in the story. Or they attacked each other for having contrasting viewpoints. In many cases, well over half of the comments on Tamir stories broke our rules and had to be deleted.

We ultimately decided that the comments sections of Tamir stories, overrun as they were by wickedness, were not contributing to the needed conversation. In early October, we reluctantly and finally decided to close down the comments on any news story about Tamir.

Or, they persisted with the ridiculous narrative that Tamir pulled his pellet gun on the drive-by shooters with badges (even though the footage clearly proves he didn't).

Either way, a 12 year old is dead and his murderer was a drive-by shooter who happened to be wearing a badge.