Last November, 12-year-old Tamir Rice was playing with a toy gun at a park in Cleveland. A person in the park called the police to report that a black male was pointing a gun at people. Cleveland police officers Timothy Loehmann and Frank Garmback responded to the call and, within two seconds-two seconds-Loehmann shot Rice. On Saturday, two experts found that the shooting of Tamir Rice was "reasonable."
The two reports were written by S. Lamar Sims, who is senior chief deputy district attorney in Denver and former FBI agent Kimberly A. Crawford. "For all of the reasons discussed herein," read the report written by Sims, "I conclude that Officer Loehmann's belief that Rice posed a threat of serious physical harm or death was objectively reasonable as was his response to that perceived threat."
The fact that Loehmann's actions were found "reasonable" has activists in Cleveland worried that the grand jury will decline to charge the officer. "It will be read, understandably, as a tragic foreshadowing of where the case may be headed: no arrest, no charges, no indictments," Rhonda Y. Williams, the director of the Social Justice Institute at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland told The New York Times.
Plenty of white adults with real guns, like defiant Nevada rancher Cliven Bundy and his merry band of protesters-managed to point their weapons at police and survive. And in Ohio, which is an open-carry state, white people can casually walk around with assault rifles slung over their backs without being killed. Though the guns are real, their skin relieves them of the burden of being a threat. Only in a country where black lives aren't valued is killing a 12-year-old boy because he has a toy gun "reasonable."
