The Justice Department announced on Tuesday that it would not file federal criminal charges against two Cleveland police officers the murder in 2014 of 12-year-old Tamir Rice, who said the video of the shooting was too poor quality for prosecutors to definitively determine what had happened.
To conclude the case, the department ended a long-running investigation into a high-profile shooting that sparked the Black Lives Matter movement and was part of the national dialogue on police use of violence against minorities, including children. The decision, revealed in a lengthy statement, does not condone the officers’ actions, but rather says the cumulative evidence was not enough to support a federal civil rights criminal prosecution.
Tamir was playing with a bullet gun outside a Cleveland recreation center on November 22, 2014, when he was shot and killed by Officer Timothy Loehmann, who is white, seconds after Loehmann and his partner, Officer Frank Garmbackarrived on the spot. The officers were called to the recreation center after a man drinking beer and waiting for a bus called the emergency center to report that a “man” pointed a gun at people. The caller told an emergency center it was likely a young person and the gun could be ‘fake’, although that information was never passed on to the officers.
In order to file federal civil charges in cases like these, the Department of Justice must prove that an official’s actions deliberately violated the law rather than being the result of error, negligence, or poor judgment. It has always been a heavy burden for federal prosecutors to meet in both the Democratic and Republican governments, with the Justice Department declining criminal charges against police officers in other high-profile cases in recent years, including the death of Eric Garner in New York. York City and Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri.
In this case, the Justice Department said that poor-quality surveillance video shot in the area where the shooting took place prevented prosecutors from definitively determining whether or not Rice reached for his toy gun right before he was shot. The two officers under investigation told authorities shortly after the shooting that Rice reached for his toy gun before he was shot and that he was given multiple commands to show his hands.
But the video reviewed by federal prosecutors makes the sequence of events less clear. The grainy time-lapse video, which has no audio, “shows no detail or perspective,” and the camera’s view is obstructed by a police patrol car, prosecutors said. In addition, although the positioning of the boy’s arms suggests that they were near his waist, they said “his hands are not visible in the video and the video does not reveal what he was doing.”
The Justice Department says seven violence experts – three employed by the family, four by local authorities – reviewed the recording, but the poor quality of the video they relied on and their “ conflicting opinions ” added little to the case. The experts used by the family said the shooting was unreasonable, while the four others said it was reasonable.
The New York Times reported in October that the department had effectively shut down the investigation, but Tuesday’s announcement makes it official.
Inconsistent witness statements also complicated any prosecution, and neither said they saw exactly what Rice did right before the shooting, the Justice Department said.
In an on-the-spot statement to three other law enforcement officers, Loehmann stated “repeatedly and consistently” that Tamir grabbed a gun before shooting him, prosecutors said.
Both Loehmann and Garmback also said in post-shooting statements that Loehmann had given Tamir “multiple commands to show his hands before firing,” and both officers saw him reaching for the weapon. Prosecutors said Loehmann and Garmback were the only two witnesses in the “vicinity of the shooting.”
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Had a grand jury refused to accuse Loehmann, however he was later fired after it was discovered he was previously considered “unfit for his service”.
The Justice Department also investigated whether the officers obstructed the administration of justice in statements they made to other investigators shortly after the shooting. Prosecutors concluded that while the statements contained a different language, they were generally consistent. And since there was not enough evidence to prove the statements false, there was also not enough evidence to prove that the officers were trying to mislead the investigators or hinder an investigation into their actions.