12-year-old Tamir Rice killing whitewash in the USA

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This video from the USA says about itself:

7 January 2015

Full video of Tamir Rice shooting incident.

CLEVELAND – Cleveland Police have released the full video of the November 22 shooting of 12-year-old Tamir Rice.

The video is the extended version of the recording from the security camera at the Cudell Rec Center. The original shortened version was available for viewing in late November.

A minute and a half after 12 year old Tamir Rice was shot by Cleveland Police officer Timothy Loehmann, Tamir’s family said his 14 year old sister, who was at the park with him, tried to run to her brother’s side.

Officers force her to the ground.

After another minute and a half, she’s placed in the back of a police car, her family says she was handcuffed.

By Niles Williamson in the USA:

The whitewash of Tamir Rice’s killing and the fight against police violence

13 October 2015

It is has been nearly one year since a police officer shot and killed 12-year-old Tamir Rice while he was playing with a toy gun in a neighborhood park in Cleveland, Ohio. Criminal charges have yet to be brought against either of the officers involved in the killing: the shooter, Timothy Loehmann, and his partner, Frank Garmback.

This weekend the Cuyahoga County Prosecutor’s office published on its web site two supposedly independent reports which both conclude that the police murder of Rice was “objectively reasonable.”

The reports are transparent efforts to deny the obvious. Surveillance video shows that the police officers rolled up to the young boy in their squad car and opened fire in less than two seconds. Rice, who was struck once in the stomach, was left by the officers to bleed on the ground without any first aid for at least four minutes. He died the next day at the hospital.

The reports, prepared by a former FBI agent and a current district attorney at the request of the prosecutor, Thomas J. McGinty, were presented to a secret grand jury that has been impaneled to decide whether or not to bring charges against Loehmann and Garmback. The outrageous decision by McGinty to selectively release reports favorable to the officers has all the markings of an attempt to whitewash the crime and condition public opinion for an exoneration.

The likelihood of Rice’s killers being charged with a crime and put on trial is extremely low; if they are brought to trial, the odds of a conviction are even lower.

While police killings are a more than daily occurrence in the United States, with most going unreported in the media, prosecutions and convictions are extremely rare. A report by the Washington Post earlier this year found that, over the past decade, only 54 officers have been charged for a fatal shooting. Of these, only 11 have been convicted. In the last three years alone, nearly 3,000 people have been killed by police.

Among the most notable exonerations in recent months was the decision by a judge in May to acquit another Cleveland, Ohio police officer, Michael Brelo, of manslaughter charges in the deaths of two unarmed individuals who were killed in a barrage of more than 130 rounds fired into their car. Last month, a local prosecutor announced that Pasco, Washington police officers would not be charged for gunning down an unarmed immigrant worker, Antonio Zambrano-Montes, in February.

These actions followed the decisions not to charge Darren Wilson, the police officer who killed Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri in August 2014, and Daniel Pantaleo, the cop who choked Eric Garner to death in July of the same year.

The latest developments in the Rice case fit into a definite modus operandi of the ruling class as it seeks to tamp down social discontent in the face of unrelenting police violence.

After a police officer commits a horrific killing, public outrage finds expression in mass protests in which justice is demanded in the form of a trial and conviction. Democratic Party politicians make disingenuous statements of concern for the deceased and promise to make serious changes that will rein in the police violence. Finally, efforts are made to prepare public opinion to accept the exoneration of the killer cop, and the killing goes on.

In instances where protests threaten to escape the control of the Democratic Party and its auxiliary organizations, the state has responded with brutal repression—as in the military-style lockdowns in Ferguson following the killing of Michael Brown and in Baltimore, Maryland this spring after the killing of Freddie Gray.

…

In fact, the unending series of police killings has much deeper roots. It is the festering sore of a society riven by social inequality, presided over by a ruling class that wages unending war abroad and is increasingly utilizing the methods of war to deal with social tensions within the country. The police are a critical instrument of the corporate and financial elite in the defense of its social system, capitalism.

…

Young people are angry and outraged by an increasingly unbearable situation and are looking for a way to fight. They understand that a society that seeks to justify the police murder of a child and hundreds of others is morally bankrupt and completely irrational.

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