The American justice announced, Tuesday, December 29, to close, without prosecution, its investigation into the police officers accused of having killed Tamir Rice, a 12-year-old black boy, in Ohio in 2014. The child had been shot dead by a policeman in Cleveland while playing with a “BB gun” : an air pistol that looks so much like a real one that manufacturers have been forced, in some states of the country, to add an orange cap to it to distinguish it. This one had been removed during the tragedy. The scene, filmed by a surveillance camera, had provoked outrage in the United States.
The prosecutors in charge of examining the investigation “Did not find enough evidence to support prosecution of 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 poor quality to establish conclusively what it was past.
On the silent recording taken by a surveillance camera, the young Tamir Rice plays with his fake weapon in a park. He points it towards a pedestrian in particular. “There is a guy with a gun”, said a witness at the scene calling the police, according to the audio tape of the call made public by the authorities. “It’s probably a fake pistol, but he points it at passers-by”, he adds, specifying that it is a young boy. The operator will not report these latter items to the patrolling officers dispatched to the scene.
The video then shows the arrival of a police car which comes to a stop directly on the lawn of the park. Tamir Rice walks towards her, without his weapon in hand. He did not raise his arms and seemed to want to take something from his belt, when he was shot dead by one of the officers, aged 26 at the time, 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 these types of cases, the Department of Justice must prove that an officer’s actions willfully violated the law, and were not simply the result of error, negligence or misconduct. bad judgment.
“The decision to close this investigation only reinforces the indifference of our legal system towards the lives of black people”, immediately denounced on Twitter the powerful association of civil rights, the ACLU.
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 involved in the March death of Breonna Taylor were notified Tuesday of their upcoming dismissal from the Louisville police force, according to a letter released by the African-American’s family lawyer.
And on Monday, authorities in Columbus (Ohio) announced that the police officer accused of killing Andre Maurice Hill, a black man, last week, in his garage, was fired.
