Tamir Rice Case Study

On November, 2014, in Cleveland, Ohio the shooting of Tamir Rice occurred. Two officers received a dispatch that a black male kept pulling a gun out of his pocket and pointing it at people. The caller later stated that the gun was probably fake and the male was a minor. Unfortunately, these two things were not communicated to both officers in time. When they arrived at the park that Rice was at they told him to put his hands up. When it looked as though the boy was going to draw instead of raising his hands Officer Loehmann shot and killed him.

The shooting of Walter Scott happened in South Carolina, 2015. Scott was stopped by police for a broken brake light. Scott was running away from officer Michael Slager and ended up getting shot. ) …show more content…
For the past three years around 1,000 people were shot and killed by police. Out of those victims more than half were armed with guns. But, the rest had knifes, toy guns or nothing at all. In those cases, police should have been able to take control of the situation.

34 out of 51 states leave the decisions of de-escalation training up to local agencies. The Dallas Police Department had an 18 percent drop in use of force the year after it launched de-escalation training. Also, since 2010 excessive force complaints have dropped by 83 percent. Las Vegas also reported a reduction in use of force and officer involved shootings that fell by more than half between the years 2012-2016 to only 10.

Over these past 20 years less emphasis on de-escalation training occured. A Police Executive Research Forum survey of 281 police agencies found that the average young officer received 58 hours of firearm training, 49 hours of defense tactical training and 8 hours of de-escalation. The ratio of using harsh force and when to use guns is disproportionate to the calming techniques like de-escalation which could end a situation in a more peaceful