The Justice Department announced on Tuesday that it would not file federal criminal charges against two Cleveland police officers in the 2014 murder by Tamir Rice, 12, saying the video of the shooting was of very poor quality for prosecutors to conclusively establish what had happened.
In closing the case, the department ended a lengthy investigation into a high-profile shooting that helped galvanize the Black Lives Matter movement and became part of the national dialogue on police use of force against minorities, including children. The decision, revealed in a lengthy statement, does not support the actions of the police, but says the cumulative evidence was not sufficient to support a federal criminal case for civil rights.
Tamir was playing with a machine 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 Garmback, arrived at the site. Police officers were called to the recreation center after a man drinking beer and waiting for a bus called 911 to report that a “guy” was pointing a gun at people. The caller told a 911 dispatcher that he was probably a young man and the gun may be “fake”, although that information never been relayed for officers.
To move federal civil rights charges in cases like these, the Department of Justice must prove that a policeman’s actions deliberately broke the law, rather than being the result of an error, negligence or bad judgment. It has been a consistently difficult burden for federal prosecutors to meet in the Democratic and Republican administrations, with the Justice Department refusing criminal charges against law enforcement officers in other major cases in recent years, including the deaths of Eric Garner in New York City and Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri.
In this case, the Justice Department said the low-quality surveillance video recorded in the area where the shooting took place prevented prosecutors from conclusively determining whether or not Rice was taking his toy gun just before he was shot. The two investigated police officers told authorities shortly after the shooting that Rice was picking up his toy gun before he was shot and received several commands to show his hands.
But the video analyzed by federal prosecutors makes the sequence of events less clear. The grainy time-lapse video, which has no audio, “shows no details or perspective” and the camera’s view is obstructed by a police vehicle, prosecutors said. In addition, they said, although the boy’s arm placement suggests they were close to his waist, “his hands are not visible in the video and it cannot be determined by the video what he was doing”.
The Justice Department says seven experts on the use of force – three withheld by the family, four by local authorities – reviewed the recording, but the low quality of the video they relied on and their “conflicting opinions added little to the case”. Experts used by the family said the shooting was unreasonable, while the other four said it was reasonable.
The New York Times reported in October that the department had effectively closed the investigation, but Tuesday’s announcement makes it official.
Inconsistent testimony from witnesses also complicated any process, and neither person said they saw exactly what Rice was doing just before the shooting, according to the Justice Department.
In a statement on the spot to three other police officers, Loehmann “repeatedly and consistently stated” that Tamir was picking up a gun before shooting him, prosecutors said.
Loehmann and Garmback also said in statements after the shooting that Loehmann had given Tamir “several orders to show his hands before shooting” and that both officers saw him taking the gun. Prosecutors said Loehmann and Garmback were the only two witnesses “in the vicinity of the shooting.”
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A grand state jury had refused to indict Loehmann, however he was later fired after was discovered it was previously considered “unfit for service”.
The Justice Department also investigated whether police officers obstructed justice in statements they made to other investigators shortly after the shooting. Prosecutors concluded that, although the statements included a different language, they were generally consistent. And since there was insufficient evidence to prove that the statements were false, there was also insufficient evidence to prove that the police tried to mislead investigators or obstruct an investigation into their actions.