An undated photo provided by the family of Tamir Rice, who was shot and killed by Cleveland police officer Tim Loehmann.

An undated photo provided by the family of Tamir Rice.

(Family photo)

CLEVELAND, Ohio -- The aftermath of the killing of Tamir Rice by Cleveland police has been at the top of the news for most of 2015, with a steady pulse of stories about the investigation, protests and demands for justice by Tamir's family.

A lot of you have relied on cleveland.com for the updates, and we've added a good bit of perspective as well with opinion and enterprise to help advance the conversation about the controversial story.

This would seem, then, to be an ideal subject for us to meet one of our chief goals at cleveland.com, hosting community conversations on topics of widespread interest.

So why, a lot of you have asked, have we chosen to turn off all comments on stories about Tamir Rice?

The simple answer is that we don't fancy our website as a place of hate, and the Tamir Rice story has been a magnet for haters.

We tried to maintain the conversation. The Tamir Rice case offers lessons for Greater Cleveland, and hashing out those lessons in an online community forum could be a healthy exercise. A lot of people firmly believe the police broke the law when they shot Tamir, but others feel just as strongly that the shooting was justified. Passions are strong, and because our comments section could provide a place for venting, we allowed comments on Tamir stories for months. We enlisted a small army on our staff to monitor the comments and delete any that violated our standards.

The trouble was that we couldn't keep up. Just about every piece we published about Tamir immediately became a cesspool of hateful, inflammatory or hostile comments. Rather than discuss the facts of the case, many commenters debased the conversation with racist invective. Or they made absurd statements about the clothing and appearance of people involved in the story. Or they attacked each other for having contrasting viewpoints. In many cases, well over half of the comments on Tamir stories broke our rules and had to be deleted.

We ultimately decided that the comments sections of Tamir stories, overrun as they were by wickedness, were not contributing to the needed conversation. In early October, we reluctantly and finally decided to close down the comments on any news story about Tamir.

Some have tried to continue their odious comments by moving their conversations to comments on stories that have nothing to do with Tamir, and in those cases, because the commenters so clearly intend to violate our rules, we have closed down the accounts of those involved.

Because the vast majority of those who comment on our site actually seek to share and offer differing perspectives, we have kept the conversation about Tamir going in one area of our website: Opinion.

We have published quite a few guest columns about the case, along with our own editorials, and the comments on those pieces have been much more enlightened than the comments on the news pieces. The conversation often is no less polarized than it was with news stories, but the commenters on the opinion pieces are more respectful of each other and try to add thoughtful viewpoints.

If you would like to join a meaningful conversation about Tamir, please add your thoughts as we continue to publish editorials and columns about developments in the case.