The family of Tamir Rice have released two reports into his fatal shooting by Cleveland police, with their lawyers calling the conclusions of previous reviews of the killing “nothing short of preposterous”.
The two new reviews of the incident – in which the 12-year-old boy was killed by police while playing with a toy gun – conclude that his shooting was unreasonable and unjustified.
The family’s attorneys presented the reports – written by two former senior California police officials – on Friday to Cuyahoga County prosecutor Timothy McGinty, who is overseeing the grand jury process. They were made public on Saturday.
McGinty released reports in October that said the shooting was reasonable, prompting the attorneys to accuse the experts who wrote those reports of a pro-police bias.
“The view expressed in those reports that the killing of Tamir Rice was reasonable and justified is nothing short of preposterous,” attorney Jonathan Abady wrote to McGinty, on behalf of the family’s legal team.
His letter included expert analysis that concluded that the officers involved in the shooting, Timothy Loehmann and Frank Garmback, should not have shot at Tamir, who was killed while playing with a toy gun in a park. Loehmann shot Tamir less than two seconds after the officers arrived at the scene.
Jeffrey Noble, a police officer with the Irvine police department for 28 years who has previously been called in to review other departments’ internal affairs, said in his report that the officers “engaged in reckless tactical decision making” and that their use of force was excessive.
And Roger Clark, a police procedures consultant from California who worked in the Los Angeles County sheriff’s department for 27 years, said in his report that the shooting was “inconsistent with generally accepted standards and norms in police practices”.
Clark noted that the Cleveland police department had a documented history of excessive lethal force. This was investigated extensively by the US Department of Justice, which released a report calling the department “chaotic and dangerous” less than two weeks after Tamir was killed.
The expert reviews were based on reviews of materials including a video of the shooting, the police department’s report on the shooting and the Ohio state highway patrol’s reconstruction report.
The experts said that officer Loehmann’s personnel file showed multiple concerning incidents which led one of his former supervisors to say that Loehmann had demonstrated “a pattern of a lack of maturity, indiscretion and not following instructions”.
Noble said that a review of the video shows that, among other concerns, there “was nothing in the dispatch information that would positively identify Tamir as the certain target of the call to the responding officers”.
On Saturday, prosecutors released a frame-by-frame analysis of the surveillance camera footage first made public a year ago that showed Tamir’s killing.
The additional images taken from surveillance video at a recreation center where Tamir was shot and killed did not appear to contain any new or substantive information.
The new footage was released in the “spirit of openness”, said McGinty.
The analysis did not show whether Tamir, as police officials have maintained, was reaching into his waistband for the pellet gun when Loehmann shot him less than two seconds after getting out of the car.
The enhancement by a video expert will be presented to a grand jury that will decide if Loehmann or his field training officer should be charged criminally for Tamir’s death.
