Cleveland Police Union Blames 12-Year-Old Tamir Rice For Being Some Kind Of Monster

[MrScorpio]

by Shrill
Feb 28 11:30 am 2015

It is tempting to look at the problem of police brutality and try to summarize it into a problem we have the tools to repair. Then you read a quote like this one, about Tamir Rice.

“Tamir Rice is in the wrong,” he said. “He’s menacing. He’s 5-feet-7, 191 pounds. He wasn’t that little kid you’re seeing in pictures. He’s a 12-year-old in an adult body. Tamir looks to his left and sees a police car. He puts his gun in his waistband. Those people — 99 percent of the time those people run away from us. We don’t want him running into the rec center. That could be a whole other set of really bad events. They’re trying to flush him into the field. Frank [the driver] is expecting the kid to run. The circumstances are so fluid and unique.

“The guy with the gun is not running. He’s walking toward us. He’s squaring off with Cleveland police and he has a gun. Loehmann is thinking, ‘Oh my God, he’s pulling it out of his waistband.’”

— Cleveland Police Patrolman’s Association President Steve Loomis, as reported in Politico Magazine.

Even a mildly attentive reading of Loomis’s language and reasoning is both illuminating and alarming. Without the carefully tailored language of the written official statement, the constructive seams in the logic of the police officer begin to show. Far from admitting culpability in Rice’s death, Loomis neatly dismisses even the idea that this was just a tragic and fatal misunderstanding. Tamir Rice is guilty in the crime of his own death. Loomis denies Tamir the innocence of childhood because Tamir has the wrong body for a child. In America, I am beginning to realize, there are no black children, but black bodies of different sizes and threat levels, latent or active, primal and overgrown. Tamir lives in an indicted, criminal body, and it is for this reason that he deserved to die. It is because of the inherent criminality of the black body that Loomis’s logic assumes that Tamir is already guilty. Tamir, being already guilty, approached the police car because he wanted to gun down the police officers, rather than running away. This is one interpretation of Tamir’s behavior. The other interpretation, not even considered plausible enough to be explicitly dismissed, is that a 12-year-old boy sitting at a park bench would approach a police car because he believed the lie that the innocent have nothing to fear from the police. He believed the lie that the police were there to protect him, too. Loomis is old enough to know that this is a lie, and this is why he finds nothing wrong with Tamir’s death. There is no fog of apathy to be burned away, no ignorance to be replaced.

Read more at http://wonkette.com/577893/cleveland-police-union-blames-12-year-old-tamir-rice-for-being-some-kind-of-monster#hZlV55LGtxiwHoSz.99

[bravenak]

1. What I got out of this is 'he was being too black.'

Racist ass bullshit that I'm sure some racist asshole will try to defend.

[bluestateguy]

2. Police "unions" are not real unions

It's time to take away their collective bargaining privileges.

[atreides1]

7. Won't happen

The politicians don't have the guts to attack their "Praetorian Guard", they need the cowards in blue in order to maintain control over 'We the People'...without them, politicians know that they are not safe!

And any student of history will tell you that the Praetorians were instrumental in the removal of several emperors who didn't meet their standards...

[Downwinder]

3. If 12 is considered adult,

let them ALL vote.

A C-store clerk has to decide if a customer is over 18. Shouldn't the same be true for a Cop?

[salin]

4. yet the representative of another major city police union threw a fit (and caused

a work slowdown) because the Mayor, who had a son who fits Tamir's complexion and thus, "read" by police officers, disclosed that he (the Mayor) had a conversation with his son about how to act around police officers.

er... while I hope this is not a universal mindset - it puts into words the mind set of some officers, which is why "the conversation" was needed. A number of events, from various parts of the country, have occurred - and now receive national attention, that seem to confirm the mindset is prevalent enough to warrant "the conversation."

My anger and my deep sadness compete with each other as to which is the dominant emotion.

[rhett o rick]

5. What if all black males wore a one piece overall with no pockets and walked around with their hands

held out to the side or better yet, over their heads. Naw that wouldn't help. The police would still shoot them and claim they were going for a weapon in their shoe or ear. How about we take guns away from the police. Seriously. Even just for a short time. And only let them have them back if they promised to be more careful. (Yes I have had a cocktail)

[socialist_n_TN]

6. I personally feel that this attitude is a legacy of the social outcome of slavery..........

Black people weren't considered fully human. They were livestock and the attitude of a lot of white people still doesn't think of POC as fully human. It's not as much of a problem to kill an animal as it is to kill a human, especially if you consider the "animal" to be threatening just because of the way he looks.

[Cal Carpenter]

8. Not just an attitude. It's systemic too, so the attitude and system perpetuate each other.

That's why racist outcomes can and do occur even when a police force (or courtroom) is not full of only white faces. The so-called War on Crime has created outcomes that mirror those of the Jim Crow laws - disproportionate arrests and punishment based on race, outrageous incarceration rates, etc.

Once again I have an excuse to promote the book The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander. I oughtta get a commission for how often I recommend it.

What a sorry state of affairs. How far we haven't come...

[socialist_n_TN]

13. Yes I agree. The social aspects are attitude of the people who makeup society........

(having been influenced by slavery and it's bastard son Jim Crow) which in turn, leads to the make up of laws and the political structures that support a Jim Crow type of society. In the above post I was separating it out, but in truth, you CAN'T really separate them. They work together to reinforce each other.

[guillaumeb]

9. the police in this country started out as

slave patrols. Nearly 400 years later that apparently has not changed. When you call them on the violent racism they get offended and threaten to slow down. I say go ahead and slow down. Slow down and think before you shoot.

Check out Tom Tommorow's take on the issue.

http://digbysblog.blogspot.com/2015/01/yessir-officer-baby.html

[phil89]

10. He was pointing a gun at people

and threatening them. It seems the outcome makes sense. What was the cop supposed to do with a gun pointed at him?

[DashOneBravo]

11. Didn't look like that

I watched the video and it doesn't look like he pointed the fake gun at the officer.

And what has happened to the idiot driving that made the decision to get that close?

[Octafish]

12. We the Enemy

We used to be People, then 9-11 changed everything.

[GGJohn]

14. What I saw from the video,

Tamir Rice was executed by a cop who was forced to resign from another LE dept.
This police union asshole is one sick mofo, attacking a 12 yo kid, who isn't even around anymore because he was executed.

[CanSocDem]

15. A couple of decades ago...

...the magazine Psychology Today did a survey of LEO's(law enforcement officers) and found that only fellow cops got the respect we are all entitled to. In their minds there are two kinds of people, "cops and assholes".

This was in the 70's when longhairs and 'agitators' were still the primary target of the sociopaths in our society. Decades later, the class war has become brutal and it won't be long before the cops are manning the barricades at the banks and shooting everyone.

.

[spanone]

16. so the big policeman was scared of a 12 year old BOY.