Pictured are 12-year-old Cleveland police fatal shooting victim Tamir Rice, and Cuyahoga County Prosecutor Tim McGinty.
By Kathy Wray Coleman, editor-in-chief, Cleveland Urban News. Com and the Cleveland Urban News.Com Blog, Ohio's Most Read Online Black Newspaper and Newspaper Blog. Tel: 216-659-0473. Email: editor@clevelandurbannews.com. Coleman is a 22-year political, legal and investigative journalist who trained for 17 years, and under six different editors, at the Call and Post Newspaper in Cleveland, Ohio. (www.clevelandurbannews.com) / (www.kathywraycolemanonlinenewsblog.com).
CLEVELAND URBAN NEWS.COM-CLEVELAND, Ohio-Community-Cleveland area community activists and the family of Tamir Rice will picket Cuyahoga County Prosecutor Tim McGinty at the Justice Center in downtown Cleveland on Nov 23 to request that he step aside as a county grand jury determines whether the two White Cleveland cops involved in the Black kid's shooting death will face criminal charges. (Editor's note: Protesters will march from the Free Stamp at City Hall in downtown Cleveland to the Justice Center beginning at 1 pm today, Nov 23, in what they are calling a shut down Ohio rally. Today's protest is the final leg of a series of events since Saturday, including a panel discussion and community vigil, to commemorate the first year anniversary of the deadly shooting).
A multicultural group of greater Cleveland clergy, led by the Rev Dr. Jawanza Colvin, senior pastor at Olivet Institutional Baptist Church on the city's majority Black east side, has called for McGinty to both step down as prosecutor in the Rice case and to resign from office.
Community activists have joined in the unprecedented request for McGinty to retire.
"We agree that County Prosecutor Tim McGinty should resign immediately, and we have experienced no prosecutor that acts like he does, particularly when it involves police killings of Black people and Black children, " said community activist Al Porter, president of the local grassroots activist group Black on Black Crime Inc.
Today protesters and Rice's family will again present petitions to McGinty for his recusal relative to the grand jury process regarding the Rice shooting. Sources said that some 200,000 signatures will be submitted.
Rice was gunned down on November 21, 2014 in less than two seconds when police officers Timothy Loehmann, who pulled the trigger, and Frank Garmback, pulled up at a public park and recreation center on the city's west side where the kid was playing with a toy gun, and following a foiled 9-1-1 call..
Last month Rice's mother, Samaria Rice, and her attorneys in a pending wrongful death lawsuit, held a press conference and called for McGinty to step aside. They have accused him of bias and prejudice for hiring handpicked experts to purportedly taint the grand jury process in favor of police, bias against the Black community that he routinely does without opposition from Democratic Black leaders and others, sources allege.
McGinty shot back by publicly ridiculing Rice's mother and releasing copies of expert reports to the media designed to sway support for the killer cops at issue.
Rice family attorney Subodh Chandra said that McGinty has created a prejudicial standard to accommodate police that is beyond what is required for a grand jury assessment on possible criminal charges and that the county prosecutor is at best "erratic."
The Black child's quick murder by police has heightened tensions between police and the Black community and follows or precedes other police killings of unarmed Black people in Cleveland and nationwide. (www.clevelandurbannews.com) / (www.kathywraycolemanonlinenewsblog.com).
