I remember reading about the killing of Tamir Rice when it happened, and being appalled by the reckless behavior of the police. They did so many things wrong that somebody needed to go jail for this, instead of doling out another monetary settlement.
In this situation the officer shot within 2 seconds of arriving. That was not a reasonable amount of time to open fire. Somebody might not see or hear you. He also shot twice for good measure. He didn't check the kid's vital signs or give him any first aid right after shooting him down. His partner Officer Garmback at least registered significantly more concern and was calling for medical help. However Tim Loehmann, the cop who actually pulled the trigger strikes me as callous.
Somebody like this should never have even been on the force. While the blood of Tamir is on Timothy Loehmann's hands, it's also on the hands of the Independence Police Department. Even taking into account that they didn't know Loehmann suffered a nervous breakdown before joining since he lied about his history on his application, he still was obviously unfit to do this work. This was someone who had no experience, hadn't been able to hold down any job for several years, and the couple of weeks of training they give you at police academy was not nearly enough to compensate for this. His supervisor warned that this man was unstable. The deputy chief of the police department Jim Polak said that Loehman could not follow simple directions or communicate clearly. Loehmann apparently shot wildly, was prone to crying spells and other unpredictable and incompetent behavior that in Polk's opinions could be dangerous. In his assessment of Lehmann he wrote, "I do not believe time, nor training, will be able to change or correct the deficiencies."
https://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/23/...d-many-errors-by-police-then-a-fatal-one.html
Unfortunately, it was only a matter of months on the job before some innocent person indeed did die at his hands.
Now someone this trigger-happy may have shot anyone's child, but with that being said, I also wouldn't be surprised if race contributed to making Loehmann so de-sensitized to the person he was shooting. It's concerning to me that he identified Tamir as a grown man. I think that indicates that he wasn't really looking at this 12 year old, but rather was looking right through him. The 911 caller who informed the police that there was someone waving a gun in the area noted that it looked like it was a juvenile, but the police officer isn't able to recognize what the civilian could see.
This case is overall just a really tragic example of why our police system is so messed up, and in need in reform. I'm not necessarily in favor of defunding them because part of the reason the police are in the state they are in some instances is because of funding cuts. I think the New York Times article a couple of paragraphs up made some good points about how there used to be community programs to better familiarise officers with the areas they police so that they would not be as militarized. Entering the community can potentially be less tension-filled if it's a neighborhood you are a part of and know the people in, rather than a place you only enter from the perspective of an outsider in situations of conflict.
I don't think we need to go the other extreme and inflate the police budget like we do our military, I just would like to see better allocution of the funding say raising salaries to bring in better people with good communication skills, also offering more extensive training than a few classes, and developing new community policing programs. Above all though the police need to be policed themselves, and somebody like Timothy Loehmann not only should not have been hired, but after he was he should have faced severe repercussions so that there was no chance of him doing something like this again. That he came dangerously closed to getting hired by another police department after killing Tamir is a reminder of how much farther we have to go on the road to reform.
