On December 28, a Grand Jury of Cuyahoga County, Ohio, declined to indict Cleveland Officer Timothy Loehmann for the shooting of Tamir Rice. Tamir’s story represents the near immunity police officers have for using deadly force, and I for one pledge to insure that the future lawyers I teach know his story and know how the system, by design, failed him.
The failure of a grand jury to indict in this situation nothing new. In recent memory, a grand jury declined to indict Officer Darren Wilson for the shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, MO. A grand jury declined to indict Officer Daniel Pantaleo in the choke-hold death of Eric Gardner in Staton Island, NY. A grand jury declined to indict the jailers of Sandra Bland for her death while in custody outside of Houston, TX (but as of this writing the arresting officer remains under grand jury investigation). In the realm of recent high-profile killings of African Americans in police custody, only the six officers alleged to have killed Freddie Gray in Baltimore, MD, have been indicted.
According to the Post, of the thousands of times within the past decade that officers have shot and killed people, only 65 of those officers have been indited, and a small percentage of that group have been convicted. And, “[a]lthough black men make up only 6 percent of the U.S. population, they account for 40 percent of the unarmed men shot to death by police this year [2015].”
This represents a pattern. Indictments in police shootings are rare. As a result, police officers have little to no judicial accountability for their killings.
Many blame prosecutorial bias for this. Some observe that jury bias or even the weakness of the cases are why such indictments are not brought. No matter what thesis you choose, these explanations point to the blind spot of the criminal justice system regarding police killings.
Ironically, the quote the Washington Post reported from Cuyahoga County Prosecutor Timothy J. McGinty, sums it up:
“The outcome will not cheer anyone, nor should it,” McGinty said of the grand jury’s decision. “The death of Tamir Rice was an absolute tragedy. But it was not, by the law that binds us, a crime.”