No cheering echoed through the gym at Cleveland’s Cudell Recreation Center on Saturday morning. No balls bounced on the wooden floor.

Two candles on a small quilt flickered at center court, while 75 people huddled in small groups around the room. They had come to memorialize Tamir Rice, the 12-year-old boy who was shot dead by a police officer outside the center last year.

As the crowd spoke and wrote about the sadness, anger and grief they had experienced since the youngster’s death, it was clear that emotions still ran high.

On Monday, a year will have passed since an officer mistook for the real thing the toy gun with which the 12-year-old boy was playing. In Cleveland, the youngster’s presence remains powerful, pervasive and palpable.

Protestors chant Tamir’s name when they rally against police violence and brutality. Anti-gang activists call his name when they rail against the violence that killed a three- and a five-year-old this past summer. Tamir Rice has become the Emmett Till of Cleveland: an innocent victim whose demise ignited civil rights activism.

“[Tamir] has to be the moral conscience of our work,” said Julia Shearson, who leads the Cleveland chapter of the Council of American-Islamic Relations. “If we can’t protect our children, and we can’t talk about why Tamir was killed so easily, we will not make much progress.”

Police officers Timothy Loehmann and Frank Garmback confronted Tamir when responding to a 911 call about a suspect in a park with a gun. Although the original caller mentioned that the gun was probably a toy and the suspect was probably a kid, the police dispatcher did not give that information to the officers.

Loehmann shot Tamir fewer than two seconds after arriving at the park gazebo where the youngster was sitting. Garmback drove the squad car. The officers have not been charged. A grand jury took up the case a few weeks ago.

Signs made by protesters line the walls of the Cudell Recreation Center gym. Photograph: Afi Scruggs

The tardiness in dealing with the officers has been controversial. In June, Shearson and seven other activists petitioned a municipal court judge to find probable cause to file for charges including murder against Loehmann and Garmback.

The gesture was mainly symbolic, however. Cuyahoga County prosecutor Timothy McGinty issued a statement saying a grand jury would ultimately decide whether to charge the offices.

“This case, as with all other fatal use of deadly force cases involving law enforcement officers, will go to the grand jury,” McGinty said. “That has been the policy of this office since I was elected. Ultimately, the grand jury decides whether police officers are charged or not charged.”

With its twists and turns – and resigned expectation among residents, activists and police that the officers involved will not be indicted – the case of Tamir Rice joined that of other African American men, like Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, Eric Garner in New York and Freddie Gray in Baltimore, who have died at the hands of police.

But Brown and Gray were men who had had run-ins with police. Tamir was a kid who had not finished elementary school.

Shearson said she read in an investigatory report that Tamir grabbed the hand of the FBI agent who was administering first aid.

“That showed he was a child,” she said, her voice breaking. “He was reaching for the comfort of an adult as he died.”

Others have died in the city. Barely two weeks before the death of Tamir Rice, Tanisha Anderson died when a Cleveland police officer restrained her in the midst of a mental crisis. In November 2012, Timothy Russell and Malissa Williams died after being shot roughly 25 times each by police, after a long car chase.

Russell and Williams were unarmed. The chase began when police officers mistook a car backfiring for shots aimed at a county Justice Center. More than a third of the officers who were on duty at the time chased the couple to a schoolyard in the suburb of East Cleveland.

The incident – dubbed by protesters the “137”, after the number of shots that were fired at the victims’ car – became a cause célèbre. Ohio attorney general Mike DeWine concluded that the episode revealed a “systemic failure” in the practices and policies of the Cleveland police department. The US Department of Justice reached a similar conclusion after spending 18 months investigating the use of force by the Cleveland police.

The DOJ held on to its report into policing in Cleveland, which recommended extensive reform, until the day after Tamir’s funeral. But even after one officer, Michael Brelo, was acquitted on two charges of voluntary manslaughter, the shooting of Russell and Williams did not inflame feelings the way Tamir Rice’s death did.



Activism has been ratcheted to another level. He was a 12-year-old doing what 12-year-old boys do: playing with guns Professor Ronnie Dunn, Cleveland State University

The DOJ’s condemnation of police confirmed local suspicions that the youngster’s death was the result of racism and brutality. In the name of Tamir, disparate segments of the community united to apply pressure on investigations into the police officers’ role in the child’s death.

Legacy organizations like the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) joined forces with churches, synagogues and mosques that comprised the Greater Cleveland Congregations. Social media activism took place under hashtags like #OrganizeCLE.

The result was an energy that Cleveland State University professor Ronnie Dunn said he had not seen since the 1960s, when Carl Stokes broke through racial barriers to be elected the first African American mayor of a major American city.

“Activism has been ratcheted to another level now, because of the sensitive nature of [Tamir’s death],” said Dunn, who researches race, urban and social policy. “He was a 12-year-old child, doing what 12-year-old boys do: playing with guns.”

The dark side of that fascination is the gun violence that plagues the city’s most fragile neighborhoods. By the end of October, Cleveland had seen 105 murders, surpassing the total for 2014.

The tally included five-year-old Ramon Burnett and three-year-old Major Howard, killed in crossfire and a drive-by respectively. While the circumstances of their deaths contrasted with that of Tamir’s, their names joined his on the roll of victims of senseless violence.

Ironically, in some ways the deaths of Ramon and Major have helped to mend the frayed relationship between residents and police in the wake of Tamir’s death.

“You couldn’t blame that tragic incident on the police,” said Detective Lynn Hampton, president of Black Shield, the fraternal organization for African American police officers in Cleveland.

Hampton is also a member of the Cleveland Community Police Commission, which will help shape police reform as mandated by the DOJ.

“When kids start getting killed, all bets are off,” he said. “We need to do some work in our community because we can’t tolerate things like that.”

Hampton, however, knows the city will be dealing with Tamir Rice’s legacy for the foreseeable future. And he is bracing himself for the city’s reaction if the police officers who shot Tamir Rice are not charged.

“I think there were certain things done that could warrant some administrative charges,” Hampton said. “But I don’t think anything is going to be done criminally.”