Question: When Is Shooting a 12-Year-Old Child Reasonable?
(COMMON DREAMS) Vince Warren — Answer: When the child is Black and the shooter is a police officer.
Welcome to America, where #BlackLivesMatter is a trending hashtag, but police impunity is a lethal reality of Black life.
There’s an old saying that the definition of a consultant is “someone who borrows your watch to tell you what time it is.” That is true when it comes to police experts as well. Cops and prosecutors come from the same culture. So it surprises no one that the experts hired by Cuyahoga County Prosecutor Timothy McGinty to investigate the fatal shooting of Tamir Rice are reading the time from the watch supplied by law enforcement and have come to the same conclusions as the county police and (let’s be honest) McGinty himself: that the shooting was “reasonable.”
You’re not likely to find any law enforcement person within a 100-mile radius who would dare speak out and say what we all know: This went down badly (not just “tragically,” as one of the experts put it) and the officers should be held accountable. Law enforcement culture doesn’t allow for people to break ranks without consequences. So please, let’s not call these hired consultants “independent” or “outside” experts. Their perspective is wholly within the law enforcement world.