For almost a year, activists in Cleveland have pushed for the arrest of Officer Tim Loehmann, the rookie patrolman who fatally shot 12-year-old Tamir Rice near a recreation center in November.
Protesters have marched through Cleveland, shared their outrage on Twitter and even used a little-known section of Ohio law to directly ask a judge to issue arrest warrants. But Loehmann has remained free, and a pair of outside reports released Saturday concluded that he was "reasonable" in deciding to shoot Tamir, who was carrying a replica gun that looked much like the real thing.
Although the investigation will continue, and a grand jury will ultimately decide on charges, some believe that those reports, which were commissioned and released by the prosecutor's office in Cuyahoga County, signal that an indictment is unlikely.
"It will be read, understandably, as a tragic foreshadowing of where the case may be headed: no arrest, no charges, no indictments," said Rhonda Williams, the director of the Social Justice Institute at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland.
Williams was among several activists who, using an obscure Ohio statute, signed affidavits seeking the arrests of Loehmann and his partner, Officer Frank Garmback.
Garmback drove their patrol car within feet of Tamir but did not fire his gun. Although a judge found probable cause on some possible charges, no arrest warrants have been issued.
The reports released Saturday night — one written by a retired supervisory special agent with the FBI, the other by a Colorado prosecutor — examined the shooting's legality under the U.S. Constitution, not Ohio law. But each reviewer found that Loehmann had been placed in a volatile situation with minimal information and had acted reasonably in shooting Tamir. Although a 911 caller who saw Tamir near the recreation center had cautioned that he was "probably a juvenile" and that the gun was "probably fake," the officers were not given that information.
David Blake, a retired California police officer who serves as an expert witness on use of force by the police, said the reports appeared "sound" when he looked them over. Blake said the decision to pull the cruiser so close to Tamir and the dispatcher's failure to relay some of the caller's caveats were worthy of further review and were potentially relevant in civil court, but should have no effect on the evaluation of whether Loehmann was criminally culpable for shooting.
But Craig B. Futterman, a clinical professor of law at the University of Chicago, criticized the reports' "laser focus" on the shooting itself and said the reviewers should have placed more weight on the events leading to the shots.
"There's strong evidence to believe, in the aggregate, the actions were unreasonable," said Futterman, who founded the Civil Rights and Police Accountability Project at the university.
Futterman said it was a "tough call" whether Loehmann had been unreasonable as an individual in deciding to shoot. The professor also said he wished the widely circulated surveillance footage of the shooting included audio so he could hear what, if anything, the officer said before firing.
Since Tamir was shot Nov. 22, his name has been chanted at protests across the country that called attention to the deaths of black people at the hands of the police. Many activists see Tamir's shooting as a clear case of police overreach: a black boy, not even a teenager, playing in a park who was fatally shot within seconds of the officers' arrival.
In Cleveland — where the police department operates under a consent decree with the Justice Department and where an officer was acquitted this year of manslaughter charges in another on-duty shooting — there has been growing frustration with the lengthy investigation of Tamir's death. Lawyers for the Rice family have criticized the most recent reports and questioned the motives of the county prosecutor, Timothy J. McGinty.
"These hired guns — all pro-police — dodge the simple fact that the officers rushed Tamir and shot him immediately without assessing the situation in the least," Subodh Chandra, one of the family's lawyers, said in an emailed statement. "Reasonable jurors in a criminal trial could find that conduct unreasonable. But they will never get the chance, because the prosecutor is working diligently to ensure that there is no indictment and no accountability."
Jonathan S. Abady, another lawyer for the Rice family, dismissed the findings of the two reports as "totally speculative" and said in a statement that it would be "highly suspicious" if prosecutors submitted the findings to grand jurors.
McGinty said that the decision to release the reports was part of an effort to be transparent about a difficult case and that his office was "not reaching any conclusions" based on those two opinions. The Rice family has also been offered the chance to provide information to grand jurors, he said.
Loehmann and Garmback have not spoken to investigators about their conduct. McGinty criticized the police union for encouraging that choice, saying the silence made it "more challenging to find answers" and was "needlessly delaying the process of justice." Stephen Loomis, the president of the Cleveland Police Patrolmen's Association, the union for rank-and-file officers, did not respond to messages seeking comment.
As the anniversary of Tamir's death approaches, there is no indication of when a grand jury will decide whether to issue charges. McGinty said his office had commissioned more reports, which will be released after they are finished.
Rachelle Smith, 34, a Cleveland resident who signed the affidavits seeking the officers' arrests, questioned some of the findings in the expert reports. Smith said she had "no confidence" there would be an indictment but was "cautiously holding hope."
"I think that a failure to indict or a failure to convict would just be another blow to a city and a community that is beat down," Smith said. "An indictment would provide hope for justice. It might signal a shift toward transforming the criminal justice system. Either way, it's just a step."