Today is Tamir Rice's 21st birthday. 
Instead of celebrating that milestone, he will always be 12 years old, because he was shot and killed in November 2014 by a white cop seconds after the cop rolled up in a squad car — before they had even stopped the car.
The facts of the case are not in dispute, but the thin blue wall descended and a grand jury decided the cop would not be charged with anything for the killing.
It later turned out the shooter had lied on his job application about previously being found unfit to serve by another police department.
Here are a few tweets from December 2015, which I posted not long after the decision in Cleveland to not prosecute the cop:
- “Everyone would have been better off had the cops never shown up." This is how policing loses democratic legitimacy.
Ta-Nehisi Coates - White supremacy is the only logic via which it makes sense for a grown cop in an open carry state to feel threatened by a kid w/ a toy gun.
Saladin Ahmed - Our most beloved Christmas movie is about a white boy and his toy gun in Cleveland, Ohio. Spoiler: the police didn't murder him.
Sarah Kendzior
Remember Tamir Rice, and all of the other people who have died from our white supremacist policing.
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