Tamir Rice, 12, was shot dead by a police officer in Cleveland while carrying a dummy air pistol.
Le Monde with AFP and AP
The American justice announced, Tuesday, December 29, to close, without prosecution, its investigation into the police officers accused of having killed Tamir Rice, a black boy of 12 years , Ohio in 2014. The child was shot dead by a policeman in Cleveland while playing with a “BB gun”: an air pistol that looked so much like a real one that manufacturers were coerced, in some States of the country, to add an orange cap to distinguish it. This one had been removed during the tragedy. The scene, filmed by a surveillance camera, sparked outrage in the United States.
Prosecutors examining the investigation “did not find enough evidence to support prosecution against Cleveland police officers Timothy Loehmann and Frank Garmback “, accused of having killed the African-American boy, said in a statement, the Department of Justice which considers that the video of the shooting is too much poor quality to conclusively establish what happened.
On the silent recording taken by a surveillance camera, young Tamir Rice plays with his fake gun in a park. He points it in particular towards a pedestrian. “There is a guy with a gun,” said a witness at the scene, calling the police, according to the audio tape of the call released by the authorities. “It’s probably a fake gun, but he points it at passers-by,” he adds, adding that it is a young boy. The operator will not report these latter items to patrolling officers dispatched to the scene.
The video then shows the arrival of a police car which stops directly on the lawn of the park. Tamir Rice walks towards her, without his weapon in hand. He does not raise his arms and seems to want to take something from his belt, when he is shot by one of the officers, then 26 years old, and entered the police force only a few months before.
Dismissal of the police officers involved in the death of Breonna Taylor
To prosecute police officers in such cases, the Department of Justice must prove that an officer’s actions willfully violated the law, and are not only the result of error, negligence or bad judgment.
“The decision to close this investigation only reinforces the indifference of our legal system towards of the lives of black people, “the powerful civil rights association, the ACLU, immediately denounced on Twitter.
Justice would have been officers never killing Tamir Rice in the first place.
But the choice to close this case on… https://t.co/qerCCDWGXp
Like George Floyd or Breonna Taylor, Tamir Rice is one of those whose names have been chanted angrily for months in the United States, considered emblematic victims of racism and police violence.
Police officers implicated in the March death of Breonna Taylor, were notified on Tuesday of their upcoming dismissal from the ranks of the Louisville Police Department, according to a letter released by the African-American’s family lawyer.
And on Monday, authorities in Columbus, Ohio announced that the policeman accused of killing Andre Maurice Hill, a black man, last week in his garage, was fired.