Tamir Rice

Tamir Rice

[...] This article is not about this a boy losing his life, whether this was a justified shooting or, whether the cops acted too fast. This is about the Fenton Precinct making residents aware of a "hot" topic and learning from this incident so Fenton never loses a child's life. If you or your children have an Airsoft or pellet gun please sit them down and talk to them about this tragedy. Your children should have rules for "toy" guns that mirror the rules of a real weapon. Pellet guns and Airsoft guns should not be allowed to be played with throughout the neighborhood, common grounds, or used to threaten or intimidate people. [...] Please inspect your child's Airsoft gun to make sure the orange tip has not been altered or removed. These guns are very realistic. [...] Warn them that these "toys" do look like real guns and could result in the police getting called on them. [...] The police will respond lights and sirens and come to a screeching halt in the area where your child is playing with the gun. Here are some tips to help your child respond appropriately. Do not run away. They need to no longer have the guns in their hands, throw it away from them. They need to comply with officers instructions. They may be ordered to lie down on the ground. Clear communication between your child and the police is essential. Police need to know that it is a toy gun; I do hope I am explaining a scenario that will never happen in our area. So again, "kids will be kids", and your children will continue playing war in the common grounds. Share this with your children; tell this story to families that might need this information, and encourage your kids to talk to classmates about this. Working together we will keep our community a safe place.

Early Thursday morning a St. Louis police precinct put a post up on Facebook addressing no, not the Michael Brown case, but the shooting of a 12-year-old Cleveland child with an Airsoft toy pistol. The post was titled "Kids will be kids?". This did not go well and the post was deleted soon afterward but here's partial transcript, from a captured screenshot All right then.

I don't know what to say here. It seems bad timing in the extreme, but all of this is, in the current America, sensible advice. Kids today playing with toy weapons get shot by cops. It keeps happening. And large but unarmed black teens and men keep getting killed, and children in their cribs get their noses blown off, and a law enforcement culture that trains for excessive force—a Shock and Awe strategy implemented for everything from traffic stops to loose cigarette sales to a line of protesters—permeates it because that is what America wants. If America did not want it, it would stop. If America wanted to change it, it would change.

We don't, and so over the last few decades rules of engagement have put more and more burden on American 12 year olds to know what to do in order to avoid getting killed when the police come.



The police chief has issued an apology for the post.