The police’s story about the shooting of 12-year-old Tamir Rice doesn’t match the video
Cleveland Police officials told a different story about what happened to Tamir Rice, the 12-year-old shot and killed by a Cleveland Police officer over the weekend of November 22, than what’s visible in the available video footage of the shooting.
MSNBC’s Chris Hayes broke down some the discrepancies between the police’s side of the story and what actually happened, and what can be seen in the video surveillance footage released by police a couple days after the shooting.
Police said, according to the Plain Dealer, that Rice was sitting under a pavilion in the park with a few people, suggesting that the boy could have been a threat to others. But the video footage shows Rice was sitting alone as police pulled up.
Police also claimed, according to the Associated Press, that the officer who opened fire on Rice asked the boy to put his hands up three times, suggesting that Rice was given ample warning before he was shot. The video footage doesn’t disprove this, but it suggests the officer who shot Rice, Timothy Loehmann, would have given the commands fairly quickly — Loehmann shot Rice within two seconds of his squad car pulling up to the park pavilion.
“Taken together, [the police account] sounds like it could have been a really threatening situation,” Hayes said. “But this time, unlike in Ferguson, there is a video, and it tells a pretty different story.”
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