Last month a police officer in Cleveland shot and killed a 12-year-old boy named Tamir Rice, who was armed only with a toy gun and playing outside a rec center.
According to the Los Angeles Times, the officer who shot him ”had been deemed unfit for duty at a previous police department,” but somehow still found his way onto the Cleveland PD.
Perhaps it was a better fit: An investigation by the US Department of Justice has found that Cleveland cops “engage in excessive force far too often, and that the use of excessive force by CPD officers is neither isolated, nor sporadic.”
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The officer’s father told the Washington Post that his son “loved the action” that came with working in a violent area of Cleveland. So much so that he created some for himself?
He has not been charged with a crime.
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Tamir Rice is just one more name on a list of that department’s many kills. Two years ago officers from Cleveland PD fired 140 rounds into a car containing two unarmed suspects. Both were killed. For the years 2010-2013, the Department of Justice “examined nearly 600 use-of-force incidents” involving CPD.
Maybe it’s just a dangerous town? Or...
Reuters reports that “The [DOJ] investigation found that supervisors tolerated and, in some cases, endorsed use of unnecessary or unreasonable force...People who investigate use-of-force claims admitted they conducted probes with the goal of portraying officers as favorably as possible and some said they used an improperly high, beyond-reasonable-doubt standard” for judging whether cops should be held accountable. [Emphasis mine]
A lawless environment? Sure. Police certainly seem to operate under a different set of laws.
In an opinion piece for CNN.com, Miami Herald columnist Frida Ghitis writes that “police in the United States are killing far too many people.” She’s not wrong.
Worse, police officers are rarely held accountable. Even when there is clear wrongdoing.
In a 1995 case, writes James Bovard in a recent essay in Future of Freedom, “Eric Holder: Patron Saint of Trigger-Happy Cops,” (not yet available online) “a DC policeman pursued a car that he claimed he had seen moving recklessly...The policeman walked up to the vehicle and shot 16-year-old Kedemah Dorsey in the chest. The car began pulling away, and the policeman hopped alongside and shot the boy in the back, killing him.” A witness said the shooting of this unarmed teenager took place at point-blank range, and that it looked like “some kind of drug shooting.”
An internal investigation “concluded that the shooting was unjustified.” At the time Eric Holder was the US Attorney for the District of Columbia – meaning it was within his purview to prosecute cops for murdering people. He declined to do so.
Another case involved Officer Roosevelt Askew, who claimed that he shot a 19-year-old male during a traffic stop in 1994 because “the driver was trying to run over another policeman.” Later the officer changed his story, admitting that he had lied, and then claimed that he shot the youth accidentally. “The US Attorney’s office eventually signed off on a deal that let Askew plead guilty merely to filing a false police report.”
Just business as usual.
During his stint as US Attorney, Eric Holder was more interested in harrassing private gun-owners than holding cops accountable, Bovard adds. “He lobbied the DC City Council to impose mandatory prison sentences for anyone convincted of possessing a gun.” According to the Washington Post Holder was behind “the most comprehensive gun seizure program in the country.”
“In a speech on Martin Luther King Day in 1995,” writes Bovard, “Holder declared that schools should preach an anti-gun message every single day. He also proclaimed that ‘we’ need to ‘really brainwash people into thinking about guns in a vastly different way.’”
No wonder literacy is so low, and so few kids can perform basic mathematics – their teachers are more concerned with political indoctrination than education. (If you can’t read this, thank Eric Holder.)
Considering how lax Holder was at prosecuting cops for shooting people, he obviously had no desire for people to think about police officers in a vastly different way. This, right in the middle of a period when the “DC police shot and killed people at a higher rate than any other major city police department” in the country!
Terrance Gainer, who served as assistant chief of the DC police from 1998-2002, even admitted, “We shoot too often, and we shoot too much when we do shoot.” For Eric Holder, they didn’t!
These days Eric Holder is posturing as a police reformer, but his record tells a different story.
Wednesday a grand jury in New York declined to indict yet another police officer, this time for the death of an unarmed civilian who was selling “loosies,” single cigarettes from packages that had not been taxed. Eric Garner died after being attacked by police officers and choked in Staten Island last summer.
Responding to the grand jury’s decision, New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio said that “The way we go about policing has to change.” He’s certainly right about that!
President Obama has suggested that money be made available to provide more personal ”body” cameras for police officers, so their interactions with the public are a matter of record. It’s no panacea, but a good idea comes rarely to this administration. Let’s give this one our full support.
