If the circumstances were the same, if the police had been called about him waving the gun about, and he was found to actually have the extremely convincing replica? I’m not convinced. I suspect you’d be in the same position George Zimmerman was.
If your position is that what the cops did “might not have been unreasonable,” perhaps you shouldn’t be defending it quite so vehemently. Your post reads a bit like a claim that you have no dog in the fight that you’ve been in for five pages.
Where does the video contradict what they say? What’s a more likely interpretation of what happened?
You genuinely think everyone is looking for the slightest chance to murder black people. You are literally paranoid, mentally ill. Get help.
By the way, we still haven’t heard the police audio yet. Their last claim was that they said “Put your hands up!Put your hands up!Put your hands up!”, either before they got to him(which means the 12 year old kid playing sitting down with the toy gun tucked in pants at the time may not have realized they were talking to him), or after they pulled right up in front of him in the 1 and 1/2 to 2 seconds before they shot him. How far do you think his hands moved between the time the third “…hands up!” was shouted at him and those shots were fired, Steophan? In the calmness of wherever you are, without police running at you and yelling at you, tell me how far you would have gotten in the fraction of a second you would have left to react?
Oh, I have a dog. It is that people, including cops, have a right to self defence. I fucking hate the idea that’s so prevalent on these boards that people have to wait until they’re injured or dying before acting to protect themselves.
Don’t want to get shot? Don’t wave a convincing replica gun around at people the ignore the cops. Whatever your age.
You know what? They may have murdered him, it’s not impossible. But neither is it impossible that space aliens mind controlled everybody into hallucinating the news reports. I need actual evidence of murder before I’ll even entertain considering it as a reasonable possibility, let alone conclude it happened beyond reasonable doubt.
Sorry, but now you’re just being ridiculous. Who here has claimed that “everyone is looking for the slightest chance to murder black people”?
The truth is that these cops probably didn’t wake up that morning planning to shoot a black kid, but they fucked up royally, totally, epically and catastrophically in their response. If they’d taken more care and done thir jobs properly, the kid would be alive.
As far as I’m concerned, they should be jailed for manslaughter, with extra years added for standing and watching as he lay helpless and bleeding to death. At that point they might still have saved his life. At THAT point, it would have been obvious that he was a kid rather than a 20 year-old as they claimed. At THAT point, he was helpless, unarmed and bleeding his guts out into the snow. So fuck 'em. I hope they fucking rot.
Not everyone. 99.9% of the police officers in the US would not have shot this boy. Why you are so intent on defending the one that did is puzzling. No one is trying to take away the right of self defense. We’re just saying it doesn’t apply to this situation.
What is the correct procedure for a felony stop for a man with a gun call?
Why are the police still relying on the very grainy and jerky video that barely shows what is going on and has no audio, and not releasing the police dash cam video, if the police video would back up what they claim they said and did?
I have no idea - I’d genuinely be very curious to know, as I strongly suspect that the procedure they used was not the one they were trained to use. Does anyone here know?
To look for a man with a gun, and not try to cover your ass by saying “He looked like a 20 year old man to me” after you shoot a 12 year old boy?
Don’t worry. The police will soon announce that the dash cam was broken that day. Or maybe the camera was fine, but the footage got taped over somehow. Ooops! Don’t you hate when that happens!
It’s really a stroke of luck that the recreation center’s surveillance video even exists. The cynic in me believes if these cops had been a little smarter, they would’ve seized and destroyed it before this story went public. What chills me, though, is how many people took the cops at their word prior to its release. I mean, it’s one thing to withhold judgment, but blaming the kid in the absence of anything except the cops’ claims? How many stories do we need to see before skepticism becomes the default?
Seems premature to conclude they didn’t follow their procedure when you don’t know what it is.
The tape show his arm/hand moving to his waistband. There was a replica firearm in his waistband. Maybe he was just scratching an itch.
Hmmm. Went looking for information about young Mr Rice’s height and weight, only found this:
http://cleveland.gotnewswire.com/news/medical-examiner-refusing-to-release-information-about-tamir-rice
**
Medical Examiner refusing to release information about Tamir Rice**
Cool story bro.
It also seems premature to defend the cops when you don’t know whether they followed protocol. And yet plenty here are arguing the cops acted in a justified manner.
All we know is that a child playing with a toy is dead. And no one has been able to persuasively explain why his death was a natural and necessary consequence of his own actions.
When I was a kid doing something vaguely improper (say playing with something I shouldn’t) and an authority figure yelled at me, I may very well have tried to quickly get rid of the object. A completely unconscious reaction driven because I would be in trouble if I found with it
Stupid of course, and wildly immature naturally, but then again I was a kid at the time.
This is bullshit. He didn’t reach for what appeared to be a gun, you fucking fuck. He didn’t do anything. They killed him before he had a chance to do anything.
The cops didn’t see his realistic toy gun. They got a call about a guy waving a gun, they drove up like maniacs on a kid with no object in his hands and gunned him down in 1.5 seconds, as if he were an active spree killer.
He didn’t pull a gun. He didn’t pull an object that looked like a gun. According to the cops–who are lying liars who lied about their actions in this incident and would have gotten away with it if it weren’t for those meddling kids and their video cameras–he reached for his waistband. They didn’t see a gun. They didn’t see a gun-shaped object. They saw a kid move his hand slightly.
The reason the cops were on hair trigger is because they pulled up within a few feet of the kid. Why the fuck would you do that to a dangerous person you thought was waving a gun around? If I thought a guy was waving a gun around, I’d park well away, because the farther away you are from a maniac with a gun the less likely they are to put a bullet into you. It’s a simple matter of trigonometry, the closer you are the greater your apparent cross-sectional area is and the more likely that a bullet will hit you.
Please, for the love of fuck, stop saying he reached for his gun. That’s what the cops claimed, but they lied, that’s obvious. He didn’t reach for his gun. That’s what cops always claim after they shoot someone. It’s an obvious lie, because we have the video of the incident, which shows no such thing. Maybe the cops thought he was reaching for his gun, because they were so scared that they mistook his inaction, or slight movements as threatening. But we can’t base our laws on the state of mind of the shooter, that state of mind has to be reasonable. Otherwise, I could shoot anyone and claim I thought I saw them reach for their waistband, and it was self-defense.
But I’m not allowed to shoot anyone just because they reached for their fucking waistband. You can’t shoot someone just because they have a gun. It is not reasonable to pull out your gun and shoot anyone you see who has a gun, because it is not reasonable to believe that just because someone has a gun they are automatically a deadly threat to you, even if they’re black.
If this is true, the cops are trying to pin all of this on the kid’s size. Funny how the narrative is already shifting away from the original defense (“We told him to drop the weapon and he didn’t!”) and now moving towards “How were we 'spose to know he was a kid?”
Even if Tamir Rice was an adult, there was no cause to shoot him like they did. They didn’t have enough facts to assume he posed a threat, and they didn’t even bother to gather those facts. Tamir’s size and apparent age actually are red herrings.