Okay, I’m late. Every opinion has been aired and likely nobody will read this anyway. But the vacancy bothers me too much to leave unfilled.
A crucial point is missing from discussion of the Tamir Rice case, the twelve year old boy shot by police in Cleveland, Ohio. But first let me dismiss what is NOT the problem.
- The problem is NOT whether the gun was toy or real.
- The problem is NOT whether the officer was alerted that the gun might not be real NOR that the suspect might be a juvenile.
No, I don’t mean to suggest that those aren’t problems. But they aren’t the problem that keeps me awake at night. They aren’t the screamingly obvious problem I see every time I watch the video, which I’ve watched far too many times.
Here’s my problem. The officer simply drives up to him and shoots the boy. It happens in seconds, at point-blank range. Judge, jury and executioner.
Question: Why was the officer so close? Why did he drive right up to Rice like that?
What happened to “STOP OR I’LL SHOOT”? I’ve seen that line on television cop shows since I was a kid. “Stop or I’ll shoot.”
Even Dirty Harry gives a warning (do I show my age?): “Go ahead, make my day.”
The officers in that car have watched television. They’ve seen “stop or I’ll shoot.” Surely their training covers warnings. Surely their rules of engagement look nothing like that video.
I don’t care if the officers thought the gun was real. I don’t care if they thought he might be 22 not 12 years old. They still shouldn’t drive up and shoot him like that. Where is their sensible self-protection?
Suppose Tamir Rice had been a 22 year old career criminal with a history of violence and a loaded semi-automatic handgun. Make him drunk; imagine he’d been arguing with his girlfriend. Create in your own imagination a truly dangerous scenario. Create a 911 phone call that might responsibly end with the officer firing in self-defense.
Why in a potentially dangerous scenario did the officer drive so close? What was he thinking when he approached so closely, skipped observation, gave no warning, and created (for himself) no time to respond?
I’m sorry. I’m losing my temper again. “Stop or I’ll shoot.” I’ve seen it on TV. I’ve seen it in movies. I just watched the video five more times. I still haven’t seen it yet.
USA TODAY on the settlement agreement. Missing the point:
Tamir was playing with a realistic-looking fake handgun in a public recreation area when someone called 911 to report a person pointing a gun at people and scaring them. The caller said he thought the gun was probably fake, but the 911 dispatcher didn’t relay that information to police, who drove their squad car to less than 10 feet from the boy. The officer on Tamir’s side of the car jumped out, said he saw Tamir reaching for the gun in his waistband, and shot the boy twice within two seconds of exiting the car. Rice died the next day.
Obviously, it’s reckless for anyone to play with a fake gun in public and point it at people the way Tamir seems to be doing in a videotape of the incident. The pistol was a non-lethal pellet gun that originally had an orange tip on its muzzle to show it wasn’t a real firearm, but the tip had been removed, and anyone seeing the gun quickly could have thought it was real. The Cleveland police have posted photos of real and fake guns online to show that they are virtually indistinguishable.