How the Cleveland PD's Shooting of Tamir Rice Was Supposed to Work

By Charles Pierce, Esquire

23 May 15

ere's the kind of thing that Trey Gowdy and Sheriff David Clarke would rather you not think about.

Back in May, a Cleveland police officer named Timothy Loehmann rolled up on a 12-year old boy named Tamir Rice, who was in a public park with an air rifle. In less than a minute, Loehmann sized up the situation and shot the boy to death. And today, thanks to Shaun King at Daily Kos, we learn that the first impulse of the Cleveland P.D. was to charge the dead boy with crimes. And, if there wasn't video, they would have gotten away with it.

Recently obtained documents from the Cleveland Police Department, displayed below, show that Tamir Rice was going to be charged with the outrageous crimes of "aggravated menacing" and "inducing panic."

This should embarrass any sentient primate. The officers involved in the killing of Tamir Rice took less than a minute to kill him and considerably more time concocting the preposterous cover story that, in less than a minute, they felt so "menaced," and so much "panic" had been "induced" in them that Rice had to be put down like a dog. What are these especially delicate blossoms doing in the police business in the first place? This is the kind of thing that was supposed to be the point of the hearings before the House Judiciary Committee this week. Not merely the hairtrigger response of an incompetent cop, but the conditioned reflex inbred in too many of them to cover up their crimes. That is not a "problem" among some bad apples. That impulse drives a culture of deadly corruption.