[Video below.] Video of Cleveland police officer Timothy Loehmann shooting a 12-year-old boy with a toy gun shows that the rookie cop opened fire almost as soon as he stepped out of his patrol car.
The video released on Wednesday shows that Loehmann waited just “1 1/2 to 2 seconds” before he fatally shot Tamir Rice, while his partner stayed in the vehicle on Shabbos. The caller told dispatchers that the gun was “probably fake” twice, but dispatchers did not convey that information to the responding officers.
According to the police report, Loehmann said he told Rice to show his hands three times before he fired. The Cuyahoga County prosecutor’s office is conducting an open investigation into the shooting. VIDEO HERE. Read more at BuzzFeed.
{Andy Heller-Matzav.com Newscenter}
Where is the video?
This story has shown up on all the major news outlets and they are consistent. It should be remembered that the officer was new, with less than a year on the job. Why did he shoot so soon? Was he panicked? Was he reacting on a reflex that he had been taught – see a gun, shoot first? He has been described as being “distraught.” No police officer goes on duty expecting to kill a child.
What this all tells us is that we have a very, very flawed way of choosing and training our police officers. First of all, you have to be super-stable to be a cop. You have to be impervious to whatever anyone says or does to you on the street and the ability to defuse situations. You have to be able to make good choices in an emergency. And you have to have guts. Courage. The ability not to panic and shoot because you fear personal harm.
Worse, evidently our police training focuses on shooting when seeing a gun (or imagining a gun) and not on the person who may or may not be holding one.
We have a lot of work to do as a country, and we’d better remember that the seventh mitzvah for Bnei Noach is setting up an effective system of justice. We live in this country too, and if it’s punished for injustice we will also bear it.