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Tamir Rice had recently traded a cellphone with another boy, exchanging it for a realistic-looking toy gun that fired plastic pellets.

Dressed warmly in a camouflage hat, gray coat with black sleeves and gray pants on a cold November day in Cleveland, Ohio, Tamir went alone to a park near his mother’s home, threw a snowball and struck poses with the lifelike replica of a Colt pistol.

Someone in the park saw Tamir, called 911 and reported seeing “a guy in here with a pistol” that was “probably fake” and that the holder was “probably a juvenile.”

But due to a series of miscommunications, tactical errors and institutional failures by Cleveland police, the responding officers did not get the message from dispatch that Tamir was likely a child or that what he was holding might be a toy. The officers did, however, get the message that the incident was a “Code 1,” indicating the police department’s highest level of urgency.

A police cruiser suddenly appeared in the park, sliding to a quick stop next to a gazebo where Tamir was standing. Seconds later, a rookie officer fatally shot the boy in the abdomen from point-blank range, describing the 12-year-old as a “Black male, maybe 20, black revolver, black handgun by him.”

The officer’s quick draw, captured in a grainy surveillance video, called into question a police statement that an officer warned the boy three times to raise his hands before shots were fired.

Tamir Rice’s fatal shooting six years ago on November 22, 2014, drew international attention, highlighted the ways in which police see Black boys as more dangerous than they are, and made Tamir a prominent symbol of the Movement for Black Lives over continued police killings and mistreatment of Black people and other communities of color.

Had he lived, Tamir would now be 18 – old enough to vote. His mother, Samaria Rice, has called for criminal justice reform and started a foundation in his honor to empower and protect Black youth.

“The murders of Tamir Rice, who was playing with a toy gun; Emmett Till, who was whistling; and Trayvon Martin, who was walking home after buying candy; all have one thing in common: They were Black boys engaged in harmless adolescent activities, but they were killed because someone thought they were older and more menacing than they were because of their race,” said Tafeni English, director of the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Civil Rights Memorial Center, which includes interpretive exhibits about civil rights martyrs.

“The long, grueling road of the anti-racist movement continues in the wake of the more recent killings of other Black people like George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Tony McDade, Sean Reed, Yassin Mohamed, Ahmaud Arbery, Rayshard Brooks and so many others – showing us how much further we still have to go to achieve justice for everyone,” she said.

FBI police database

The shooting death of Tamir Rice and other police killings have prompted efforts to track officers with troubling backgrounds who leave one department and then go to another.

The officer who killed Tamir, for example, had a history of emotional problems related to a girlfriend. A supervisor at another Ohio law enforcement agency where he previously worked said he was “distracted and weepy” at a shooting range and that he “would not be able to substantially cope, or make good decisions” in stressful situations. He was allowed to resign from that department after six months.

In March 2014, the Cleveland Police Department hired the same officer without reviewing his personnel file from the previous department. After the officer shot Tamir in November of that year, the Cleveland Police Department fired him for lying on his job application. But in 2018, yet another Ohio police department hired him.

Spurred on by Tamir’s killing and others, the FBI in 2015 created a national database of police use of force. But the effectiveness of the database has been called into question because, among other issues, police departments around the country are not required to share their disciplinary data.

Read more here.

In solidarity,

Your friends at the SPLC