Question: When Is Shooting A 12-Year-Old Child Reasonable?

Answer: When the child is Black and the shoot­er is a police officer.

Welcome to America, where #BlackLivesMatter is a trend­ing hash­tag, but police impuni­ty is a lethal real­i­ty of Black life.

There’s an old say­ing that the def­i­n­i­tion of a con­sul­tant is “some­one who bor­rows your watch to tell you what time it is.” That is true when it comes to police experts as well. Cops and pros­e­cu­tors come from the same cul­ture. So it sur­pris­es no one that the experts hired by Cuyahoga County Prosecutor Timothy McGinty to inves­ti­gate the fatal shoot­ing of Tamir Rice are read­ing the time from the watch sup­plied by law enforce­ment and have come to the same con­clu­sions as the coun­ty police and (let’s be hon­est) McGinty him­self: that the shoot­ing was “rea­son­able.”

You’re not like­ly to find any law enforce­ment per­son with­in a 100-mile radius who would dare speak out and say what we all know: This went down bad­ly (not just “trag­i­cal­ly,” as one of the experts put it) and the offi­cers should be held account­able. Law enforce­ment cul­ture does­n’t allow for peo­ple to break ranks with­out con­se­quences. So please, let’s not call these hired con­sul­tants “inde­pen­dent” or “out­side” experts. Their per­spec­tive is whol­ly with­in the law enforce­ment world.

An inde­pen­dent inves­ti­ga­tion would have asked the ques­tion: If the 911 caller could see that the “sus­pect” was a child and the gun “prob­a­bly a fake,” why could­n’t trained police offi­cers see that? An out­side per­spec­tive would have tak­en note that police arrest white sus­pects with real guns all the time with­out fir­ing a shot, let alone killing the sus­pect with­in two sec­onds of arriv­ing on the scene. And any observ­er who real­ly believes that Black lives mat­ter as much as white lives would have expressed out­rage that the two offi­cers involved did not admin­is­ter first aid to Rice after he was shot. He died the next day, and it’s a more than rea­son­able ques­tion whether the offi­cers’ cal­lous dis­re­gard for his life was the dif­fer­ence between life and death.

Also rel­e­vant to those of us out­side the warped world of police cul­ture: last December the Cleveland Police Department was hit with a report by the Department of Justicecrit­i­ciz­ing the exces­sive use of force by offi­cers and the unnec­es­sary use of weapons. In May, white Cleveland police offi­cers sued their own boss­es for being dis­crim­i­nat­ed against in favor of Black offi­cers on the same force. They say that the brass treats them more harsh­ly than Black offi­cers after use-of-force situations.

In a cul­ture like that, where cops feel aggriev­ed because they are cops, and feel espe­cial­ly aggriev­ed because they are white cops, it’s no won­der that the coun­ty police who inves­ti­gat­ed the Rice shoot­ing have issued no rec­om­men­da­tion and that the hired experts found the shoot­ing “rea­son­able.”

Which brings us back to McGinty, the pros­e­cu­tor. He is tak­ing the now famil­iar “neu­tral” approach to indict­ing the cop who shot Rice, an aban­don­ment of a pros­e­cu­tor’s actu­al job that seems to apply only in cas­es where cops have shot a Black per­son. Add to that McGinty’s fail­ure to con­vict Officer Michael Brelo in the 2012 police killing of an unarmed Black cou­ple and I’m sure the Cleveland Police Department sees, like the rest of us do, that the writ­ing is on the wall for yet anoth­er pros­e­cu­to­r­i­al fail­ure when the police kill Black people.

There is noth­ing remote­ly “rea­son­able” about any of this
See orig­i­nal sto­ry here : Question: When Is Shooting a 12-Year-Old Child Reasonable?