“… becoming more prevalently understood with each videotaped incident of police and their brutal over-responses to black citizens”
“If… ‘we don’t second-guess police officers in their split-second, under-pressure decision-making,’…If this wasn’t a mistake in the execution of police business, what would one look like?”
“…when is perception alone predicate for lethal force? The officer shot Rice twice without a warning or inquiry. At minimum, that’s reckless — a dynamic that itself can draw serious charges when it results in death.”
“And what’s the lesson here? Don’t play with toy guns? Or that quick and faulty judgments by police officers are justified, even when they are fatal?”
“And in a nation where there are as many real guns in circulation as there are people, and where even the most tepid restraint on possession or sale is met with virulent and organized opposition, how can a child’s possession of a toy be reason to shoot first and never ask questions?”
“The devaluation of black life among African Americans is a vile acculturation of centuries of legal and social ennobling of black inferiority in this nation, an idea that is reinforced when police face no consequence for shooting a 12-year-old black child dead because he was playing with a toy gun.”
I don’t mean to steal a Gs article, but wow does this writer from the Detroit Free Press articulate what just happened in the Tamir Rice ruling well. THANK YOU – http://www.freep.com/story/opinion/columnists/stephen-henderson/2015/12/28/black-lives-tamir-rice-and-americas-uncivil-history/77998986/