No indictment for officer who shot Tamir Rice; reasonable to assume officer was threatened

The facts as you think you know them, not the facts as they actually are. Ignorant people like you spouting off about things you think you know are how things like this get blown out of proportion. The people who all saw the actual facts of the case deemed that there wasn't even enough to hold a trial.....but sure, you know better.

 

I'm sorry you can't have a rational dispassionate discussion that is civil and respectful. I tried.

 

I certainly can, you just don't like that i'm yet again right. I tell you the way things actually are, you pop off with ignorant BS completely ignoring the actual facts of the case. As to the respectful part, you sort of have to earn that....and you won't do that the way you are going.

I'm telling you what the grand jury said, I'm telling you what are the official facts and you are basically responding saying that you like turtles.



Say that you don't think that it's right that the law is the way it is, fine.

Say that you wish the prosecutor had rigged the grand jury to get a trial, fine.

Say that the facts aren't the facts because you saw a grainy youtube video? Not fine.

 

Facts I shared are straight out of wikipedia which is completely referenced at the bottom. There were verbatim.

Calling me names, kido, saying I talk a big talk and so on..these accusations - it is not respectful debate. And I am tired of this silliness. I don't have the time to discuss with you if you are going to be more about putting down the other side than a thoughtful discussion. I know that's lofty expectations for D&D but I am trying to hold to a higher standard.

Good luck.

 

Ah yes, Wikipedia. Totally more valid than the official release when they announced the grand jury's decision. Look man, I get it, you want to try your best to make a case that some kind of injustice happened, but it's just not the right case for that. The facts simply don't support that.

You should give up on discussing this case and stick to the Laquan McDonald case, that's one where actual wrongdoing happened. That was a legitimate case of a cop murdering someone.

You do yourself a disservice by trying to force a narrative where the facts simply don't support it.

 

Do you dispute the chief saying that he represented no physical threat to the officer?

And do you think it is ok for a cop to shot a child with something that looks like a gun without an attempt to establish the gun being a toy or not? You say reasonable person - was that the test the grand jury used to let the cop off? I am just saying I am very surprised because this looks really bad.

 

It is vague ambiguous.... Then again most self defense laws are purposely written to be vague so it can possibly cover a wide variety of scenarios.

Self defense cases also tend to be very controversial.

Personally would not want to be the citizen that reported Rice, the dispatcher that failed to convey it may be a toy gun, the officers that shot with the engine hot or the kid that gave Rice the gun....... A 12 year old is dead as a result of a long line of "what ifs".

 

He didn't represent a physical threat to the officer because the gun wasn't real....but they didn't know that.

As to the grand jury, yes they were essentially saying that there was no cause to bring charges because the use of force was justifiable in that a reasonable person would have reason to suspect that they were in danger responding to a call about someone with a gun, then seeing that person reach for the gun as you got out. They also saw an "enhanced" version of the video that we all saw and supposedly that shows the kid going for the gun. We now know he was doing so innocently, but that's enough to represent a threat.

It totally sucks that a kid got shot, but in this instance, it wasn't a criminal act. It was just a terrible tragedy caused by a series of unfortunate events. The dispatcher didn't relay to the officers that the person who reported the kid to the cops said that she thought it was a toy gun. If that dispatcher had said that, odds are they don't react the way they did. It was called in as a person with a gun at the park. Hearing that you'd be on a much higher alert than hearing that it is most likely a toy.

The kid did absolutely the worst thing that he possibly could have done in grabbing for a gun when the cops are there. He was 12, so I'm not saying that he should have known better, but he couldn't have screwed up worse.

The cops shouldn't have pulled up so close to the kid, it made a stressful situation worse and likely contributed to the shooting.

There's just a lot of reasons this happened, but none of them are actually criminal.

 

Not criminal but definitely negligent and that was my point. A kid playing with a toy gun should never end up shot. I don't think you can blame a child for that situation. Our system has to take that into account.

When I was a kid, we all played with toy guns and they looked perfectly real because it pre-dated all the safety stuff. People weren't calling the cops on kids and reporting them to cops, and cops weren't rolling up with guns ablazing.

Of course I lived in a predominantly white neighborhood where the kids playing with guns were white. Maybe that's part of it.

 

That's not a part of it at all, there were numerous factors that went into this kid getting shot. It was a "perfect storm" scenario of tons of things happening. The kid would have been just as dead if he were white....how do we know this? Well cops shoot more white people a year than black people, it just isn't hyped up as much because there isn't a narrative to push.

Hell you probably never even heard about Gilbert Collar, the 18 year old that was shot by police while completely unarmed and naked but you heard a ton about Micheal Brown. The reason for that? What narrative can you push when a black cop kills a white kid? Since there was no narrative to push, hardly anyone even noticed when the cop wasn't indicted (he shouldn't have been IMO) but a town was burned when the cop in the Brown case wasn't indicted. Hell they saw the cop in the Brown case not being indicted as "proof" of a racist system. That kind of thinking is just ridiculous.

Sticking to the facts and merits of individual cases is the only way to go. Like I said though, there is a current case where there is actual police wrongdoing where someone totally got murdered AND the cops tried to cover it up. That should be getting a lot more attention than this one.

 

Now we can actually address the heart of the matter with what's wrong with your entire paradigm.

You place more onus of responsibility on a 12 year old child to act responsibly and rationally than grown men trained in law enforcement to follow absolutely basic common sense tactical procedure.

That there is the entire problem with your paradigm. It's an irrational and dim-witted paradigm. I guess that's expected of you with your post history. A mere layman with absolutely no tactical training would know not to drive RIGHT UP TO A SUSPECTED ARMED INDIVIDUAL let alone a trained officer. But no, let's place the burden of being a rational person on the 12 year old kid rather than the grown adult cops. How stupid can someone actually be?

The 'series of unfortunate events' can be summed up with two officers with no common sense speeding up to a suspected armed suspect placing their life in danger along with the child's.

 

You know what else is wrong about defending the officer?

Let's remember that Ohio is a open carry state.

So the people defending the officer are alright with carrying their arms openly, being reported to the police for scaring people, and then being shot just like that.

 

You're missing the point almost entirely, it's not that he had a "gun", it's that he reached for the gun when the cops tried to stop him. It being an open carry state means nothing because there's no such thing as a "reach for you gun when a cop stops you" state.

 

Seems like you missed the point.

 

In less than 3 seconds?
They had murder on the brain . . .and they took the shot
They never gave him a chance

Rocket River

 

Yes, in less than 3 seconds. How long are you going to wait while someone goes for a gun? You'll find that most cops will be unwilling to give you the chance to grab a gun and there's nothing wrong with that.

 

The officers put themselves in that position by being complete idiots and driving right up to the suspected armed individual.

Honestly, the amount of idiocy required to perform such as blatant tactical error leads me to suspect they intentionally did this to purposefully put themselves in a position to gun down someone.

 

...which fits the narrative you would like to push but not the evidence that the Grand Jury was presented

 

Okay, so they were complete idiots? Please explicitly show me exactly what reasoning they had to drive RIGHT UP TO A SUSPECTED ARMED INDIVIDUAL? Common sense. ****ing use it.

 

It doesn't even matter, could be they were scared....

Openly carrying your weapon is grounds for you to get shot now, as long as the officer feels threatened. Some guys don't seem to get that.

It's not about whether he reached for his toy gun, it's about that the cop felt threatened by that movement.

It's so open to interpretation since some people feel threatened just by seeing the weapon in the first place.