The Tamir Rice settlement: Our view
City that doesn’t pay for quality policing will get what it pays for.
No one is blameless in the tragic shooting death of 12-year-old Tamir Rice in Cleveland in November 2014. But the fact that the city just agreed to pay $6 million to settle a lawsuit by the boy’s family suggests where most of the culpability lies — and where changes must occur if tragedies like this aren’t going to happen again and again.
Tamir was playing with a realistic-looking fake handgun in a public recreation area when someone called 911 to report a person pointing a gun at people and scaring them. The caller said he thought the gun was probably fake, but the 911 dispatcher didn’t relay that information to police, who drove their squad car to less than 10 feet from the boy. The officer on Tamir’s side of the car jumped out, said he saw Tamir reaching for the gun in his waistband, and shot the boy twice within two seconds of exiting the car. Rice died the next day.
Obviously, it’s reckless for anyone to play with a fake gun in public and point it at people the way Tamir seems to be doing in a videotape of the incident. The pistol was a non-lethal pellet gun that originally had an orange tip on its muzzle to show it wasn’t a real firearm, but the tip had been removed, and anyone seeing the gun quickly could have thought it was real. The Cleveland police have posted photos of real and fake guns online to show that they are virtually indistinguishable.
In this instance, the cop had seconds to react and understandably thought he was confronting someone with a real firearm. Kids shouldn’t have guns that look so real police react by shooting them; just this week in Baltimore, police shot and wounded a fleeing 13-year-old boy who was carrying a fake gun that looked like a semiautomatic pistol. Laws to sharply restrict these fake firearms are a good idea.
The fact is, children do stupid things every day and they shouldn’t die for it, not when trained police officers could take basic steps to prevent a confrontation from ending in a needless shooting. Repeated viewings of the Cleveland videotape show that the officers drove up so close to Tamir, they left themselves little option but to shoot. Had the officer who shot him been able to take cover a short distance away, he might have been able to get the boy to drop the weapon or at least put his hands in the air. At least, the officer could have bought time he didn’t have when he got out of the car just feet from someone he thought had a real gun.
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That wasn’t the police officers’ only misstep. With Tamir on the ground with two bullets in him, they neglected to offer medical help until an FBI agent arrived on the scene and began emergency care.
Subsequent investigation showed that the officer who shot Tamir had been pushed to resign from a smaller police force in a nearby town after superiors found him to be emotionally unstable, especially during firearms training. The Cleveland police didn’t know that because they never asked to review his personnel file before they hired him.
Cleveland officials then continued the blundering. When Tamir’s family sued, the city responded by saying the shooting was entirely the boy’s fault. The mayor subsequently backtracked and apologized. Then it turned out that city was pursuing a $500 claim against Tamir’s family for his emergency medical care. Again, the city backtracked and said sorry.
The $6 million settlement appears to be the largest in the city’s history for a police shooting, something The (Cleveland) Plain Dealer said in a pointed editorial that the cash-strapped government could hardly afford. It’s almost the same amount Baltimore paid the family of Freddie Gray, who died after being thrown around inside a paddy wagon after being arrested, and the amount New York City paid to the family of Eric Garner, who suffocated while being arrested after repeatedly protesting that he couldn’t breathe.
Cleveland isn’t alone in dealing with poorly trained police officers who in some cases should never have been hired. That’s a problem across the country, where departments with tight budgets and pressure to fill the ranks cut corners in ways that put the public at risk. A city that doesn’t pay for quality policing will get what it pays for, and so will its citizens.
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