According to two outside investigators who looked into the Tamir Rice shooting, police officer Tim Loehmann acted properly within the constraints of his training.
I don't see how you look at the video above and come to that conclusion, but they did.
The reports released Saturday night — one written by a retired supervisory special agent with the F.B.I., the other by a Colorado prosecutor — examined the shooting’s legality under the United States Constitution, not Ohio law. But each reviewer found that Officer Loehmann had been placed in a volatile situation with minimal information and had acted reasonably in shooting Tamir. Though a 911 caller who saw Tamir near the recreation center had cautioned that he was “probably a juvenile” and that the gun was “probably fake,” the officers were not told that information.
The outrage has been instant and angry.
An Ohio prosecutor handling the fatal shooting by police of a 12-year-old boy while he played with a replica pistol was criticized by activists on Sunday for releasing two reports that called the shooting "reasonable" before any grand jury decision on charges had been announced.
"It looks as though the prosecutor is trying to taint the grand jury process as well as manipulate the judicial process overall," said Edward Little, one of the so-called Cleveland 8, a group of clergy, academics and activists who have called for the two police officers involved in the November 2014 playground shooting of Tamir Rice to be indicted.
...
Little said the release of the reports to media late Saturday on a holiday weekend was "reminiscent" of prosecutors' handling of the shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri where details of the case were leaked to the media before a grand jury decision not to bring charges against the police officer involved.
"This community has lost all hope in this prosecutor to be fair and impartial," Little said.
It's not limited to the community. I don't see how anyone can justify this shooting when the video shows there was no time for Tamir to comply with whatever instructions were allegedly shouted at him.
