Tamir Rice

[Lumpy]

He wasn't running around aiming it at people on the street

He actually kind of was. That's what the caller said too. And even if he wasn't aiming directly at people, he was still waving a realistic looking gun around in a public park. And I doubt he was trying to fight 2 cops as a 12 year old boy. He was probably thinking all he had to do was show them that it was a toy and it would be okay.

And as a kid I was told never to remove the orange tips from toy guns because if I did the cops would probably shoot me. Might have been a Canadian thing.

I just read that the police are also claiming they meant to stop the car further from Tamir, but slid on the snowy grass.

 

[Requiem]

I didn't say he was trying to fight cops, I said he heard a car, or, better put, he heard a sound that seemed threatening and in the few seconds the situation lasted, he reached for the gun as something to swing in case someone was trying to do something to him. If I heard a car coming up behind me that shouldn't be there and I had something on hand to potentially swing around, I'd probably reach for it too.

Also kids don't tend to listen to stuff like common sense. Yeah, it was stupid of him to even have something like that on him, especially since it looked real enough to warrant a call. At the end of the day though, the kid was stupid. He didn't need to be shot just for being stupid like most kids are. As for the sliding thing, why were the cops even driving on the grass? And even if that does explain why they were so close, why start shooting immediately as you get out of the car? That guy shouldn't have been a cop, as we've seen from his files and what not, but even still, three seconds is not near enough time to accurately assess what's happening. I could keep typing, but my point would eventually end up as saying the cops are still entirely to blame here (not that you're saying anything differently from that, at least as of that last post you made). That guy shouldn't have been on duty, they shouldn't have driven on the grass if their car wasn't equipped to drive on it, at least not until they assessed the situation and considered Tamir a viable threat (as in, they can drive all over the grass if the kid really was a problem/shooter), and they shouldn't have opened fire right when they got out of the car.

The kid was stupid, but the cops were more than stupid. That ended up costing an innocent life.

 

[Lumpy]

When cops need to address a gunman, they tend to use their cars as cover. If they had stopped on the clear patch of grass, where they allegedly wanted to, they would have been able to do that. Really, anywhere past the posts would have been a good spot for that, other than where they ended up.

Had everything gone as it was supposed to, what we would've likely seen was the cops get out of their car with their guns drawn, yell at Tamir to show his hands, and then approach and cuff him while his hands are up so they can calmly assess the threat.

My personal opinion is that Tamir holds a good chunk of accountability for what happened here, but not that he's fully at fault for his own death. Here's the question I've been struggling most with: Between the officers, who was more at fault? Officer Loehmann(the shooter) or Officer Garmback(the driver)?