“Tamir Rice "A 12 Year Old In an Adult Body"

[damnedifIknow]

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.


http://wonkette.com/577893/cleveland-police-union-blames-12-year-old-tamir-rice-for-being-some-kind-of-monster

[marym625]

1. FUCK those asswipes!

Jesus christ, they murdered a child in cold blood.

I am so angry

[damnedifIknow]

4. Waistband?

From this video he looks like he had his hands in his sweatshirt pockets. It's not perfectly clear but that's what it looks like to me.

[marym625]

5. He had already put the "gun"

In his pocket. They tell him to drop the gun (which was their first report) so he goes to get it. And they murder him.

[Scootaloo]

2. "He's walking toward us"?

Trick of perspective, caused by NEARLY RUNNING HIM OVER IN YOUR CRUISER

[LeftOfWest]

3. Murdering Thugs with guns and badges

go screw yourselves and spare us any more of you Loomis, and your thug supporters.

[ND-Dem]

6. huh? The Cuyahoga County Medical Examiner's Office autopsy says Tamir was 5 feet 7 inches

and weighed 195 pounds (88 kg).

Not exactly a bruiser, since the average height of a white American male is 5'10

https://www.google.com/?gws_rd=ssl#q=average+height+american+male



and his weight puts him between the 75th and 95th percentiles for a white 15 year old. Not surprising he's a little heavy going into the growth spurt years. But he wasn't no scary kid in a man's body.