Tamir Rice should be a familiar name to you. If it isn’t, you should question your humanity. Tamir Rice was slain by Cleveland Ohio police officers in November of 2014. He was a child. Tamir Rice was twelve years old and he was gunned down in lessthan two seconds. These are undisputed facts.
First, I want you to conduct an exercise the next time you’re driving. Stop your car and try to get out in lessthan two seconds-then, try to perform anyaction with meaning, clarity and intent.
Now, how did that work out?
On Monday, the family of the victim was awarded $6 million dollars by the city of Cleveland.
Under the terms of the Rice settlement, which has yet to be approved by a judge, $5.5 million would go to the boy’s estate, $250,000 to his mother Samaria and $250,000 to his sister, according to Reuters.
The president of the Cleveland Police’s Patrolmen’s Association, Stephen Loomis, suggested that the family use a portion of the funds to “educate young people like Rice on gun control and the danger of gun replicas”.
Are you serious right now?
The term is “victim blaming”. It refers to tone deaf and oblivious individuals that completely misread a situation and assign blame to the innocent instead of the blatantly guilty; in this case, the guilty is without question the irrational police.
Don’t believe me? The officer’s were found in the wrong and a settlement was reached, though it is still pending a judges approval.
This Loomis person is skewed and misguided enough to suggest that the problem lies with the ever increasing number of adolescents that carry toy guns in public and not with the unfit, mentally ill-equipped so-called officers of the law.
The attempt is to conflate police brutality and murder with a completely separate aspect of crime, initially in the hopes that attention will be refocused away from them. Secondarily, it is meant to illustrate that a group of people are, in fact, the cause of their own perceived misery.
Where was the statement by Stephen Loomis approving the settlement? Where was the admonition of the two officers that murdered a child without consideration or even the slightest attempt to adhere to proper procedure? It is also worth noting that the grand jury led by Cuyanoga County Prosecutor Timothy McGinty refused to indict either officer. It is also noteworthy that Loomis reportedly suggested that the boy was in the wrong.
Not only is this idiot suggesting that the family does not truly deserve the monetary settlement such as it is, he is also implying that they don’t know how to best administer the money the way they see fit.
That money will be supplied by taxpayers, not the police union, not the individual guilty cops and not by Stephen Loomis. Ask those same taxpayers whether some portion of it should go toward lecturing the non-existent toy gun owning troubled youth, just tempting the police to kill them, or if it should be used to train incompetents that a child should be viewed as such and not described, as Loomis described Tamir, as a menacing 5′ 7″- 191 lb adult and should be approched appropriately.
But, that would require courage and professionalism, and the lives of melaninated people would have to be seen as inherently valuable.
I suppose you can blame these children for their circumstances though- if only they’d been farther West and had actual guns, pointed those weapons and threatened law enforcement officials with death or held a government facility hostage of weeks, all with media coverage – all of these dead kids and unarmed young people would still be alive today…they’re just doing things wrong.
