Yesterday it was announced that the grand jury convened in Cleveland, Ohio decided not to indict the police officer who shot 12-year-old Tamir Rice to death. Tamir Rice was shot and then died in the hospital in November 2014, which means that the grand jury must rank as the of the most dilatory grand juries in living memory. The case was not complicated, because what happened before and after the shooting was caught on video.
Although the grand jury should rightly be severely criticized for taking so long to reach a decision, the greater blame should fall on the prosecutor for not doing his job. The prosecutor, in effect, served as the defense attorney for the officer who did the fatal shooting, instead of doing the job of evaluating the evidence and determining if there is sufficient evidence to bring an indictment to the grand jury. Grand juries do not make decisions on guilt or innocence: they determine if sufficient cause is provided to bring an indictment.
The police officer in question shot young Tamir an estimated two seconds after he exited his vehicle. He did not order Tamir to drop what he was holding or question him. If the police officer feared for his life, he had a rational alternative. He could have crouched behind his vehicle and from there ordered of cajoled Tamir to drop the gun and walk away.
There are two prongs to the argument that the shooter should not be held to account in the Rice case: the first is that the dispatcher did not convey the information that the 911 caller said it might be a boy with a toy gun and the second was that Tamir Rice was an unusually large 12-year-old. These are very weak reeds on which to rest a defense, given that the police officer had an alternative as described above. Also, the dispatcher should have suffered some sort of adverse action for not providing vital information.
The prevailing narrative is that police officers --- and sheriffs deputies, for that matter -- put their lives in danger every day to serve and protect the police. We now have a very large body of evidence that these law enforcement officers have an exaggerated fear of their own safety and will put that above preserving the life and limb of those citizens with whom they come into contact, even when the threat seems to be minimal to a reasonable person. Thus, when the St. Louis police shot to death a man who may have had a small knife in his hand, the shooting was determined to be justifiable, because the St Louis Police Department has a policy that anyone with a knife in view may be fatally shot if he/she enters a 25-foot circle of protection. Luquan McDonald, the 17-year-old Chicago teen was shot numerous times after he had fallen prone on the street. The police report said he made a menacing gesture with a knife while lying on the street. The video of the shooting and its aftermath doesn't show any movement on the part of McDonald. I have seen another video of a male lying on his stomach, but head raised and a right hand clasping a knife, stretched out in front. He was shot to death, because, as claimed by the police, he represented a threat to others. Unless and until he rose up and began to charge someone with the knife thrust out in front, he represented no threat to anyone.
We have regressed to the point in the United States where it is very difficult to indict a law enforcement officer for excessive use of force and virtually impossible to convict him/her if brought to trial. Prosecutors are even more protected, as in many legal jurisdictions they can't be held to account for serious misbehavior, such as railroading an innocent person to prison or even Death Row.
No comments:
Post a Comment