Family of Boy Killed by Cleveland Officer to Pursue Criminal Case(nytimes.com)
nytimes.com
Family of Boy Killed by Cleveland Officer to Pursue Criminal Case
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/09/us/family-of-boy-killed-by-cleveland-officer-to-pursue-criminal-case.html
4 comments
If the prosecutor doesn't want an indictment, there won't be one. The kind of thing this is good for is to shed light on that reality.
The early narrative was that it was the dispatcher's fault because she didn't relay the message (from the original caller) that the gun was probably fake. I've seen the video, it looks like he tried to pull on the cop, but the video is grainy. I'm no officer but I'm not sure why they decided to pull so damn close to him when they knew he may have had a weapon. The kid was pointing the gun at people - clearly he didn't deserve to be shot, but talking about him like he was some innocent babe laying in the sandbox is dumb. All three of these incidents in the last few months have had very big gray areas. The NYC choke out was by far the worst, IMHO.
But, none of these compare to the DJ Henry case from a few years back.
I think there is a bug in the title of this article, because I read it as: Boy's family impedes criminal case, so officer kills them.
Good. The officer's story was completely destroyed by the video evidence.
Video of the shooting: http://www.wkyc.com/story/news/local/cleveland/2014/11/26/ta...
The point is that the police initially reported that the officer told Tamir Rice three times to put his hands up and that he then "reached for his waistband." The video illustrates that the police pulled up and shot him way too fast for any of that to have happened.
For people who understandably don't want to watch the video: police pull up very quickly in front of kid, cop jumps out with gun drawn, shoots him. The whole "waistband" thing is a bit of a running joke with regard to justification of police shootings everywhere - what are your hands close to when you're standing?
What's on the video is obviously the worst of it but the way things were handled both before and after the shooting was also horrible.
The point is that the police initially reported that the officer told Tamir Rice three times to put his hands up and that he then "reached for his waistband." The video illustrates that the police pulled up and shot him way too fast for any of that to have happened.
For people who understandably don't want to watch the video: police pull up very quickly in front of kid, cop jumps out with gun drawn, shoots him. The whole "waistband" thing is a bit of a running joke with regard to justification of police shootings everywhere - what are your hands close to when you're standing?
What's on the video is obviously the worst of it but the way things were handled both before and after the shooting was also horrible.