Finally, Officer Jason Van Dyke charged in June, trial begins next week

Tamir Rice was a tragedy but it absolutely was a just and good shooting.

The officer didn’t have the luxury of 20 / 20 hindsight. So if your going to be fair you can only judge him based on what he knew and what he knew was that someone was waving a gun around in park and that it was a shooting about to happen. He wasn’t told that the caller thought it was a fake. He wasn’t driving so he couldn’t control where the car stopped. He couldn’t control Tamir Rice’s actions as he jumped up and started pulling the gun on him. All he could control was how he and any sane person would react upon arriving at a man with a gun call and then suddenly having that person with the gun right in front of you and drawing that gun.

Way to avoid the issue. The fact is, if that child had pointed his toy at you, you would have believed you were about to be shot. Cops are no different.

Hopefully the cop’s punishment, if he’s charged, will serve as an example to all (including the black community), and everyone, especially cops, need to learn that one should be in sound judgement of character to be firing a gun.

Yeah he didn’t have much of a choice.

The dispatcher and the driver were complete ■■■■ ups.

Yes I do know that because anyone put into the same situation would react in the same manner unless they were suicidal.

He reacted appropriately and exactly as trained given the circumstances.

No, you don’t know and you can’t possibly know that. You’re just making it up, obviously.

No, what I’m saying is completely factual which is why he wasn’t indicted. Any reasonable person under the same circumstances with the same training would have reacted in the same manner.

You on the other hand keep declaring him unfit purely out of your own prejudice. You’ve never seen any of the records from the original employer or from the Cleveland PD much less his current department.

While the driver (a rookie) may have contributed to the outcome, he did not really ■■■■ up. As I said earlier, the police entered the park from the other side (because that is where they were when they got the call) and drove across the grounds (not on roadways) to get to the location where dispatch said there was a man brandishing a gun. They unexpectedly encountered the row of bollards from the back side which directed them right next to where Tamir was sitting rather than allowing them to return to the road in front of the picnic shelter. They did not even see him until they were nearly upon him and Tamir stood up and confronted them with his gun.

Actually the driver was the TO and the shooter was the rookie. He put the rookie into a position where he was left with no choice but to shoot.

Let me be very clear here.

You cannot be factual about a hypothetical. That’s literally impossible. Nothing you can say will change that.

His original department declared him unfit. His second job fired him for lying on his application. He killer a child. I feel bad for the poor citizens he is supposed to serve because their police department are idiots.

Okay, my mistake … but he did not deliberately or even negligently put his partner in that position, coming across the grounds and ending up on the back side of the bollards put them in that position.

I disagree completely, he certainly could have stopped well short of the gazebo and should have. By doing what he did he was putting both of them in grave danger given what they were responding to.

He did not know that Tamir was in the gazebo until they got there. The “location” report was not that specific.

Assuming that is true he should have stopped before even entering the area to assess it and figure out exactly where the reported gunman was before approaching.

Watching the video though I can’t believe it was anything but intentional and that he knew exactly where Rice was when he planned and executed the approach.

If he had stopped before he got to the far side of the park where the dispatcher sent him, he wouldn’t have been doing his job. The video is misleading because it only shows the last few feet of the journey the car took to get there. I don’t want to belabor this, but if you dig back into this, you can find the details of the route, including a map and Google Earth, that the car took coming across from the other side of the park. And because of vegetation and obstructions, was no way that they could have seen Tamir in the gazebo until they were almost upon him and the only path available to the vehicle at that time was right up next to it. Had they had complete information from the dispatcher (relating everything the caller had reported) they might have made other choices, but considering the information they had, it was just bad luck, not negligence that resulted in them ending up where they were.

Ultimately this boils back down to the dispatcher giving them an incomplete picture of the situation at hand and no relaying pertinent information from the original call in.

As for Tamir, I have no idea why he would have pointed a toy gun at police. That makes no logical sense. Unless he was frightened out of his mind and did it out of reflex.

Nope. I would never shoot a child. And he didn’t have to kill him either. People of color just don’t merit the same respect for human life that white people do. Never have. If these cops are that scared they shouldn’t be in law enforcement.

Spoken like a true keyboard warrior.

There’s no way he could have known how old he was.

And there are times where I bet you would do exactly what you say you wouldn’t. There are places in the world where 10 year olds are used as soldiers. And sometimes adults have to shoot them otherwise they will be killed.

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That is complete crap. When a man-sized individual points a gun at you (regardless of his race) you are not going to study him to determine if he is a child or not, you are going to assume that he is fully prepared to shoot you. And if that does not scare you, you are not human.