Another bit to add to the pile of awful.
As Tamir Rice’s 14-year-old sister rushed to her brother’s side upon learning he’d been shot, police officers “tackled” her, handcuffed her and placed her in a squad car with the Cleveland officer who shot Tamir, her mother and a Rice family attorney told reporters Monday.
The mother, Samaria Rice, was threatened with arrest herself as she “went charging and yelling at police” because they wouldn’t let her run to her son’s aid, she said.
Two little boys had come to her door and told her the police had just shot her son. At first she thought they were messing around, but then she realized they weren’t.
She ran to the scene, admittedly frantic, and arrived at the same time as an ambulance. Officers wouldn’t let her check on her son, she said, “and then I saw my daughter in the back of a police car, the same one the shooter got out of.” Family attorney Walter Madison said police placed Tamir’s sister in the car with Loehmann.
Samaria Rice said she calmed down and asked police to release her daughter. They told her no, she said. Not only would they not release her daughter, but later, she said, they made her choose: Stay with her daughter or accompany her son to a hospital.
She chose the latter but was told she couldn’t ride in the back of the ambulance with her son, so she rode in the front seat on the way to the hospital, she said.
That’s fabulous police work. They knew by then that the gun was a toy – so on what possible grounds were they detaining his sister? On what possible grounds were they refusing to release his sister, and refusing to let his mother sit with him in the fucking ambulance?? They knew they had just shot a playing child in the stomach, and they wouldn’t let his mother sit with him in the ambulance. What.the.hell.
In that shooting of that mentally disturbed man, Kajieme Powell, in St. Louis (same metropolitan area that includes Ferguson), not quite 2 weeks after Michael Brown was murdered by a cop, the cops cuffed Powell *after* they’d emptied their weapons into him. Powell was clearly dead. So why roll him over and handcuff him at that point, unless you’re planning to make some cockamamie claim about how you had no choice but to kill him in cold blood? I thought you might be referring to that: http://www.newsweek.com/new-video-police-shooting-2nd-man-st-louis-emerges-266041
They needed them separate so the cops could interrogate them before they compared notes, so that any minor discrepancy in their statements could be seized upon to discredit them. They are cops – they know best how to manage victims and witnesses so as to make the court case (if there even is one) go the way they want it to. They know that the average jury still puts a great deal more stock in “eye-witness” testimony, and they also know that eye-witness testimony is terribly unreliable.
It’s how its done – the same tactics that work on actual criminals work even better on innocent victims, because the criminal is expecting to be treated like a criminal. If you want multiple witnesses to look bad on the witness stand, get em upset, get em separated. Wait till they are frantic – sobbing is best – then quickly take their statements with a bunch of short, fired off questions that lead each witness in different directions. Ask one of them “Were there four gunshots, or five?” and ask the other one “Were there two gunshots, or three?” Then the prosecutor can tear them apart months later on the witness stand when (of course) recollection is probably very spotty, due to being extremely upset at the time and then the passage of time since. “You told the officer at the time that you heard three shots. Your mother said there were four. ”
It’s all very coldly calculated to make things as easy as possible for the cops involved. When the grand jury fails to indict, the cop that murdered a child will shake the prosecutor’s hand and say “Thanks! You really saved me out there!” and the prosecutor who just deliberately let off a murderer will say “Just doing my part, thanks for doing yours so well, made my job a lot easier.” And then they all go home to their families and sleep easy because, hey, it’s just
slavesn*****sblack peoplethugs and who cares about them? It’s not like they are real people.Blanche Quizno @ 1. they do that just on the off chance that the dead person suddenly comes back to life, grabs a weapon and runs amok. Seriously.
You just never know when there will be another resurrection or, more probably, a zombie apocalypse.
@3 Rob, yet, inexplicably, when someone disappears, no one ever even considers the possibility that they were raptured up to heaven….
They’re taught to do that (as was i). Justification, for regular people, requires reasonable fear of death or grave bodily harm: that’s what self defense is. Police have that too, but they have a separate justification as well: the h can use all necessary force to complete the arrest. To claim the second, they must for one thing actually complete the arrest. I’ve been taught before, “if you have to shoot someone, cuff the body.”
They will probably claim self defense, but cuffing the body keeps their options open.
A Masked Avenger,
Arresting a dead person? That makes no sense to me, whatever the legalities.
@John Morales:
Yeah, it’s weird–but what if he isn’t dead? And it turns out you never actually arrested him? There goes “I did it to effect the arrest”!
I have the impression from the MSM that US police, in contrast to other Western forces, are rather too eager to handcuff people generally, whether or not they’re any immediate threat and regardless of the seriousness of the alleged offence, that’s a public humiliation that wouldn’t be easily forgotten.
I just want to comment on the last point there. It’s standard practice in my ambulance service to avoid having any extra people in the back with critical patients. There’s lots to do and untrained hands get in the way. I sometimes make exceptions when the patient is unable to talk and I have a lot of questions for family members, but even then I am more likely to get a family member up front and have my driver relay their answers.
With that said, if the police told my patient’s family they couldn’t ride in the back, I might just have them back there out of spite. But the article isn’t clear about whether that instruction came from the police or the paramedics.
Given that cops who tossed a flash-bang grenade into the crib of a baby (read up on this one) wouldn’t permit immediate medical attention this is no surprise. The thugs in body armor have to let you know that their lives count and your life does not.
And yeah, the ‘questioning’ of police is largely designed to create a situation where minor discrepancies are used to discredit a person entirely, and are conducted in such a way to make that more likely. What’s absurd is that it works. If I told you that yesterday, I drank 4 cups of coffee and it turned out to be 3, would someone say “I bet you didn’t even drink anything!” But yet remembering 3 shots instead of 4 means no shots were fired?