The day ended with impassioned calls for calm; that Cleveland and Ohio residents be respectful and mindful of the process and the inevitable march toward justice. I closed my laptop during Cuyahoga Prosecutor Tim McGinty’s call to remain calm and his invocation of the fabricated danger against police because I, like most people paying attention to this sort of thing, had already seen this movie before.
There was the shooting itself. Tamir Rice’s fate was probably sealed when a 911 call was placed about him and dispatchers neglected to inform police that he could have been a child playing with a toy gun. When Cleveland police officers got the call, they already had the playbook: in their minds this was an armed and dangerous black man. And you know what happens to armed and dangerous black men.
When officers Timothy Loehmann and Frank Garmback pulled up to Rice, irresponsibly close and creating a situation that could only end in tragedy, they of course judged Rice to be much older and much more dangerous than he actually was. Either that, or they knew that just about any defense would serve to keep them out of prison. So, instead of trying to de-escalate or try anything other than using lethal force, Loehmann did the one thing police officers are trained to do best. He shot first and asked questions later.
Even after mass protests and Tamir Rice’s name becoming a rallying cry for Black Lives Matter, McGinty followed the same playbook as written in Ferguson and Long Island before. There was a grand jury, in which—instead of deciding if there was enough evidence to indict—McGinty did the opposite and began a campaign of publicly citing reasons to ease the pressure after the decision to not indict. There were the early reports released by his office in the name of “transparency” that both supported the officers. More details emerged: that Rice wore large pants; that the video had been enhanced; and that Loehmann gave verbal commands and aimed for the gun. All of the tactics had been honed in police grand juries before.
And the end result, as expected, was no indictment.
In the end there were no riots. A handful of protesters braved the cold winds and rain because they knew what we all knew: that it was over as soon as Loehmann pulled the trigger. This is the way things were always going to turn out.
