No charges on cops for Ohio killing

A grand jury in Ohio declined to bring criminal charges against the Cleveland police officers involved in the fatal shooting last year of a 12-year-old boy, a prosecutor said Monday.

The November 2014 death of Tamir Rice — a 12-year-old black boy who had been carrying a replica gun in a playground when he was shot dead — and the fatal shootings of other African Americans by the police have triggered protests across the country.

Surveillance video showed Rice was fatally shot within seconds of the patrol car arriving on the scene as he began to pull the toy gun out of his waistband.

The boy died hours later in hospital.Cuyahoga County prosecutor Tim McGinty described a “perfect storm of human error, mistakes and communications by all involved that day”, and said evidence considered by the grand jury “did not indicate criminal conduct by the police.”

“It would be irresponsible and unreasonable if the law required a police officer to wait and see if the gun was real,” Mr McGinty told reporters.

The Rice shooting came just days before a grand jury opted not to indict a white police officer who fatally shot unarmed black teenager Michael Brown in the St Louis, Missouri, suburb of Ferguson in August 2014.

The two incidents are frequently cited in the ongoing national debate about how race plays into police actions in the US.

In the latest incident to raise hackles, police in Chicago responding to a domestic dispute on Sunday shot dead a young black man who was allegedly holding a baseball bat as he came down the stairs and also killed his neighbour, a mother of five who had answered the door.

Rice’s family said they were “saddened and disappointed” by the grand jury’s decision “but not surprised.”

They accused McGinty of “abusing and manipulating the grand jury process to orchestrate a vote against indictment” and urged federal prosecutors to “step in to conduct a real investigation.”