The Indian-American community must rally against police brutality as it is already suffering the consequences, says Subodh Chandra, lawyer for the family of 12-year old Tamir Rice who was shot dead by police in Cleveland.
Ohio prosecutor Tim McGinty announced last week that a grand jury has refused to indict the police officer, Tim Loehmann, who shot the child playing a make-believe game in a park with his toy-pellet gun on November 22, 2014. McGinty said he recommended the decision, which followed a year-long investigation into the shooting.
“Tamir could have been me,” Chandra told News India Times.
“My mother, like Tamir’s mother, didn’t want me to play with toy handguns. But I did get hold of it… and I too could have been shot down by a police officer.” Chandra said he also feared for his children.
“As the father of triplets, three boys who are almost 12, Tamir could have been my son,” he said. “The injustice is glaring and takes place at a time when injustice by police primarily against African-Americans is getting to be known more because of video technology, although it has been going on for a long time,” he said.
The Indian-American community needs to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with the African American community, said Chandra, former law director for the City of Cleveland . “If Indian-Americans don’t speak up about this kind of terrible injustice it would be us next. It will be open season,” Chandra said.
“It has already happened — take the case of Mr. Patel in Alabama, and look at all the Sikhs we hear about being attacked every day. We have to get out of our silos and recognize the reality,” Chandra asserted.
He was referring to the case of Sureshbhai Patel, an Indian citizen and grandfather who was slammed to the ground by a police officer outside his son’s home in Madison, Alabama. A mistrial was declared twice in the case against the officer. Noting that “the police officer shot Tamir in under one second,” Chandra asserted that it went against the standard of “objective reasonableness,” a consideration determined by a police officer at a particular moment of arrest or other action against a person. Embedded in the 4th Amendment following two Supreme Court rulings in Tennessee v Garner (1985) and Graham v Connor (1989), the clause is open for controversy and interpretation.
In this case, the grand jury ruled in favor of Loehmann holding that any “objectively reasonable” police officer would have used such force under the same circumstances. The Chandra Law Firm LLC, headed by Chandra, has been involved in numerous high-profile cases, and notes on its website, “We live by the creed, ‘Not just cases. Causes.’”
According to news reports, after Tamir was shot, a video of the incident shows the officers handcuffed the boy’s 14-year old sister and put her in the squad car when she came to her brother’s aid. The Cleveland Police Department is notorious for alleged use of excessive force by its officers, a reputation that gave rise to a federal inquiry led by Vanita Gupta, head of the U.S. Justice Department’s Civil Right Division.
Gupta crafted a “Consent Decree” with Cleveland police this past May, and was optimistic it would lead to a transformation of the city’s police.
The grand jury ruling and McGinty’s handling of the Tamir Rice case appear not to bear that out. Chandra said he was pleased with Gupta’s Consent Decree but that it was only the first step in changing the culture of the police department in his city.
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