Two brothers were playing together in a park outside Cleveland when the police rolled up. It seems someone living nearby thought the two were acting a bit odd and called 911.
It was like déjà-vu all over again. The two brothers, ages 12 and 15, were playing near a park pavilion – they were black and had weapons. Does this sound familiar at all?
Does it not sound like virtually the same scene set up in the Tamir Rice shooting? In 2014 (hard to believe it's been two years), the scene was virtually identical: a park in Cleveland, young black kid, playing near a pavilion, toy pistol. The only thing different was the outcome.
Just as this recent event, 12-year-old Tamir Rice was playing with his airsoft BB pistol in a Cleveland park. Someone witnessed him waving the gun around and as it had no orange tip on the gun barrel distinguishing it from a real pistol, they called 911 and reported the incident as a lunatic brandishing a firearm in the park. Police arrived on the scene and shot the kid dead within seconds. If you care to refresh your memory on the Rice shooting, you may review the police footage of the entire incident. My audio commentary, which begins at 9:50, is above the embedded video. The police appear in the video at 7:08 in. You may review it here.
Thankfully, this latest incident ended without anyone being shot or killed. The police didn't come screaming in at high speed like some scene in an action movie. Therefore, the kids were overly startled and didn't panic. The kids were respectful and cooperative, putting there hands up and obeying the officers' commands. And the officers acted more reasonable, actually affording the kids the time to be respectful.
The kids were handcuffed and hauled away. I'm not sure that was necessary, but I wasn't there, so maybe it was.
Last week an attorney for the two kids requested that the case be dismissed. The judge will decide on that in August, but in the meantime she assigned the two a preliminary sentence. Judge Je'Nine Nickerson has ordered them to each write an essay about the Tamir Rice incident.
Handing down her judgment, Nickerson said, "It is a very fine line when people have to make split-second decisions as to what is a BB gun and what is a gun. When a police officer has to respond, in this particular climate, you are putting yourself at risk," she told the youths. "You have to understand that your actions have consequences." She also assigned them community service and is making them pay a portion of the court costs.
The intention of the exercise is apparently to cause the brothers to think about the similarities and differences of the two incidences, a few of which I chronicled above.
One glaring difference that aided in determining the two outcomes were the 911 calls and subsequent police dispatches. In both events, the 911 callers evidently told the police dispatchers that the suspect(s) looked like a kid(s) and the gun(s) was probably a toy.
In this latest incident the 911 operator relayed this information to police prior to the encounter. Prior to the Rice shooting, the dispatcher said only that the subject was a black male who kept pulling a gun out of his pants.
Hopefully, the judge's motive are pure and these essays are meant for the two kids to concentrate on their own actions – not to be playing with "unmarked" toy guns in a public park. I think the judge is doing the right thing (assuming motive) in requiring the writing of the essays. They may learn a lot more than merely being punished. It appears, refreshingly, that the judge has no dark motive to blame the police and wants to help the kids, rather than just send them away.
It would be nice for a change to see these two kids actually learn something from this incident and adjust their behavior in the future.