Tamir Rice case holds lessons for police training, fake guns
There’s plenty of blame to go around in the tragic shooting death of 12-year-old Tamir Rice in Cleveland in 2014. But the city’s $6 million settlement with the boy’s family suggests where most of the culpability lies — and where changes must occur if tragedies like this aren’t going to keep happening.
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 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. Tamir, who didn’t receive medical care until an FBI agent arrived on the scene, died the next day.
Obviously, it’s reckless for anyone to play with a fake gun in public. The pistol was a 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.
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 last 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 replica firearms are a good idea.
The fact is, children do stupid things every day and they shouldn’t die for it, not when trained law enforcement officers could take basic steps to reduce tragic outcomes.
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.
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.
The $6 million settlement, which appears to be the largest in the city’s history for a police shooting, is almost the same amount Baltimore paid the family of Freddie Gray, who died in police custody, and the amount New York City paid to the family of Eric Garner, who suffocated while being arrested.
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.