MANSFIELD: He Loved the Action #TamirRice

Fred Loehmann, the father of Tim Loehmann, the Cleveland cop who shot and killed 12-year-old Tamir Rice in a Westside playground on Nov. 22 when the child allegedly put his hand on a toy gun in his waistband, made a very telling comment while discussing his son’s involvement that fateful day: “He loved the action.”

Therein lies a huge part of the problem of officer-involved shootings in America. Too many young, testosterone driven officers in this country simply love playing cops and robbers; not enough of them are attempting to be “peace officers” — the term Canadian law enforcement are known by. Commendations, awards and medals are not given out in this country based on how well the peace is kept; they’re given out based on involvement in chaotic and dangerous situations.

Tim Loehmann, according to his father, who also had a career in law enforcement, quit the Independence Police Department because “he grew tired of the slow pace of suburban policing,” evidently craving the cowboy culture of big-city policing, which provides the thrills and chills of high-speed chases with sirens blaring, potentially violent confrontations, and, all too often — death.

The excuse always given by trigger-happy officers and their supporters is that cops have a right to go home safely to their families at night — a sentiment no one would deny — but if safety was of paramount concern for Loehmann, why didn’t he just remain on the force in Independence? It’s much safer being a cop in that relatively wealthy suburb.

Another part of the problem is accurate data on deaths: No one in America, not even the vaulted U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics, knows just how many people are killed by cops annually. As noted in a recent Washington Post article, “while the federal government and national research groups keep scads of data and statistics — on topics ranging from how many people were victims of unprovoked shark attacks (53 in 2013) to the number of hogs and pigs living on farms in the U.S. (upwards of 64,000,000 according to 2010 numbers) — there is no reliable national data on how many people are shot by police officers each year.”

We don’t know because we don’t want to know — willful blindness.

The FBI does know how many cops die in the line of duty each year. In 2012 (the most recent year for which FBI data is available) it was 48 – 44 of them killed with firearms.

Again, quoting the Washington Post article, “Several independent trackers, primarily journalists and academics who study criminal justice, insist the accurate number of people shot and killed by police officers each year is consistently upwards of 1,000 …” That’s a lot of dead civilians; no wonder the government doesn’t want the American public to know. Recent moves by President Obama to ameliorate this plethora of killings under color authority perhaps should have included the mandating of the collection of such data.

Nonetheless, with or without accurate information from the government, an increasing number of citizen-driven organizations around the country are coalescing and demanding change. And the racial diversity of these groups (many young whites are on the frontline of these protests), while initially startling, is a harbinger of change.

The last great civil rights movement of 50 years ago was greatly energized by the presence of white Northerners who put their lives at risk by journeying south to stand up for what was right and just. The same thing is beginning to happen with this surfeit of killings of young black males. This being America, blacks can protest all they want, but without the active support of white protestors nothing will change.

And as one white protestor recently stated on TV, the fact of whether or not Michael Brown had his hands in the air when he was gunned down, he still is the martyr of this nascent movement, albeit a flawed martyr to be sure. Indeed, if his killing were an isolated incident, if dozens upon dozens of other unarmed blacks have not died at the hands of cops in this country, his death would not be noteworthy. But the sheer number of preceding deaths made Brown’s the straw that broke the camel’s back. And the death of Tamir Rice, so fast on the heels of the grand jury’s decision not to indict Darren Wilson, is overwhelming ironic, a sad punctuation point further proving that we have a serious problem in this country.

But the genie of discontent is out of the bottle around the country, and is not likely to willingly go back in. Change (that will cause increasing turmoil in the land, but will not be easily derailed) is coming, and not a minute too soon. Young black lives hang in the balance.

However, the wonder, in terms of statistics, is not the excessively high number of killings of young black males. The real wonder is, given the mindset of so many white officers who patrol black communities across America, and the ease in which they are routinely exculpated, that the death toll is not much higher.

From Cool Cleveland correspondent Mansfield B. Frazier mansfieldfATgmail.com. Frazier’s From Behind The Wall: Commentary on Crime, Punishment, Race and the Underclass by a Prison Inmate is available again in hardback. Snag your copy and have it signed by the author by visiting http://NeighborhoodSolutionsInc.com.

 

 

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