Prosecutors claim that a newly released and enhanced video showing the death of Tamir Rice indicated that “the 12-year-old boy reaching for his pellet gun moments before he was fatally shot by police.”

The slightly clearer still images will be presented to a grand jury that will decide if patrolman Timothy Loehmann or officer Frank Garmback should be charged over the death of Tamir last November.

The two videos do not appear to show any new substantive movement but an annotation on one of the clips suggests Tamir moved his hand towards his waistband in the instant before he was shot, according to the prosecution.

This combination of still images taken from a surveillance video and released Saturday, Nov. 28, 2015, by the Cuyahoga County Prosecutor’s Office, shows Cleveland police officers arriving at Cudell Park on a report of a man with a gun. Twelve-year-old Tamir Rice was fatally shot by Cleveland police officer Timothy Loehmann, Nov. 22, 2014, after he reportedly pulled a replica gun at the city park. The enhancement by a California video expert will be presented to a grand jury that will decide if then-rookie patrolman Loehmann or his training officer should be charged criminally for Loehmann killing Rice. (Cuyahoga County Prosecutor’s Office via AP)

The still images were taken by a security camera at Cudell Recreation Center. They show different angles than video of the incident previously released.

Police officials initially said that Loehmann, 26, yelled three times at Tamir to raise his hands, a claim witnesses have denied and no footage has shown.

The images back up later claims that the officer shot Tamir within two seconds of jumping out of a car.

The young boy had been holding a pellet gun moments before police arrived.

He was shot once in the torso and died on the operating table a day later.

Cuyahoga County Prosecutor Tim McGinty said the new footage was released in the ‘spirit of openness’. 

‘Once again … we are not reaching any conclusions from these or other isolated bits of evidence,’ McGinty said. ‘Individually they are simply pieces of a complex puzzle.’

Loehmann and Garmback, 47, were responding to a call about a young man waving and pointing a gun outside the rec center. A 911 caller had also said the gun might be a fake and the man could be a juvenile, but that information was never relayed to the officers.

A friend told deputies he had given the pellet gun to Tamir hours before the shooting with the warning to be careful because it looked real, according to court documents.

He said he had taken the gun apart to fix it and been unable to reattach the orange cap that goes on the barrel to indicate it isn’t the .45-caliber handgun it is modeled after.

A grand jury has begun evaluating evidence to decide whether criminal charges should be filed against two white police officers in the fatal shooting of Tamir Rice, a 12-year-old black boy carrying a pellet gun outside a recreation centre.

The head of Cleveland’s largest police union told The Associated Press on Tuesday that officers were subpoenaed to testify before the grand jury last week and on Monday.

The Nov. 22, 2014, killing became a flashpoint in the wake of other deadly police encounters with young black males across the country.

Tamir was playing with a borrowed airsoft gun, which shoots nonlethal plastic pellets, when someone called police. The gun bore a striking resemblance to a real firearm, in part because its tell-tale orange tip had been removed.

Footage recorded by a surveillance camera showed then-rookie patrol officer Timothy Loehmann shooting Tamir within two seconds of a patrol car skidding to a stop just feet from the boy. Questions remain about whether Loehmann told Tamir to raise his hands before firing two shots, one of which struck Tamir.

Henry Hilow, an attorney who accompanied the officers to the grand jury, declined to comment.

Subodh Chandra, an attorney for Tamir’s family, issued a statement on Tuesday criticizing McGinty for not telling Tamir’s mother, Samaria Rice, that prosecutors had begun presenting evidence to the grand jury.

Chandra and other Rice family attorneys have been calling on McGinty to allow a special prosecutor to take over the case.

Last year, prosecutors obtained an indictment charging white Cleveland patrolman Michael Brelo with voluntary manslaughter for his role in the deaths of two unarmed black people killed in a 137-shot barrage of police gunfire after a lengthy, high-speed chase. Brelo was the only one of 13 officers who fired their weapons the night of Nov. 29, 2012, to be charged criminally. Prosecutors argued that the car’s occupants, Timothy Russell and Malissa Williams, no longer posed a threat when Brelo fired the final 15 rounds.

A judge acquitted Brelo at trial in May.

That case helped prompt a U.S. Justice Department investigation that concluded Cleveland police too often use excessive force and violate people’s civil rights. The city and the DOJ reached an agreement earlier this year on a police department reform plan.

The Guardian has dome some digging up into statistics posted by the FBI and discovered some interesting missing details from these reports.

Killings by police that unleashed a new protest movement around the US in 2014, including those of Eric Garner, Tamir Rice and John Crawford, are missing from the federal government’s official record of homicides by officers because most departments refuse to submit data.

Only 224 of 18,000 law enforcement agencies around the US reported a fatal shooting by their officers to the FBI last year, according to previously unpublished data obtained by the Guardian, which sheds new light on flaws in official systems for counting the use of deadly force by police.

The Counted, an investigation by the Guardian to report all deaths caused by police in 2015, had already logged deadly shootings by officers from 224 different law enforcement agencies by 10 April this year. Crowd-sourced counts in 2014 recorded deaths at a similar higher rate.

Stephen Fischer, a spokesman for the FBI, said exclusions were inevitable because the program remained voluntary. “We have no way of knowing how many incidents may have been omitted,” Fischer said in an email.

Amid mounting pressure on public authorities to overhaul the recording of deadly incidents involving law enforcement, an extensive review of all data on “justifiable homicides” by police collected by the FBI from police departments between 2004 and 2014 found:

• No police departments from the state of Florida reported any homicides by officers, meaning deaths caused by police in the country’s third-most populous state were not logged by the FBI. The New York police department, by far the country’s biggest, submitted data for just one year during the past decade.

• The FBI records only basic personal details of each person killed and not information such as whether they were armed with a weapon – a critical factor in ongoing debates over the use of force by police around the country.

• A chaotic approach was applied to recording other high-profile deaths over recent years. Some were logged, some filed to a separate category with general homicides without noting the subjects were killed by police, and others were ignored.

• An increase in the number of homicides by police publicly reported by the FBI over the past five years was effectively matched by a rise in the number of individual departments reporting any homicides, casting doubt over purported trends in the data.

• Details of other controversial deaths that prompted protests were entered incorrectly in the FBI database, damaging government efforts to monitor demographic information about people killed by police.

The analysis of raw FBI data was carried out as the US Department of Justice announced it was trialling a new open-source system for counting homicides by law enforcement. The system’s methodology closely resembles those of The Counted and a Washington Post record of fatal police shootings.

News of the pilot program, which is being run by the department’s bureau of justice statistics, came following strident comments from both US attorney general Loretta Lynch and FBI director James Comey, who reiterated calls for better official records of homicides by police.

Comprehensive records of killings by law enforcement officers has been a demand of the Black Lives Matter movement, which has risen to prominence since the fatal police shooting in Ferguson, Missouri, of Michael Brown in August 2014. It was also among the recommendations made by Barack Obama’s White House policing taskforce, which was convened following Brown’s death, which was among those recorded in the FBI database.

While the people killed were not named in the FBI database, some could be identified by matching entries with publicly-available information on their age, sex and race, as well as those of the officer who shot them, the location of the incident, and the month it occurred.

But the death in July of Eric Garner, who was placed in a chokehold by an NYPD officer allegedly confronting Garner about selling loose cigarettes, was not included in the official federal record. The NYPD has not submitted data to the FBI since 2006. It pledged earlier this month to release more detailed data on officers’ deadly use of force from next year.

Erica Garner, Garner’s daughter, said she was “outraged but not shocked” by the omission. “It’s just another part of the cover-up and erasing of his murder from the record,” Garner said. “It says to the NYPD and the city and state of New York that my father’s life doesn’t matter.”

No other department in the state of New York had any homicides by officers recorded by the FBI during the decade except for one, by Rochester in 2006. In its annual Firearms Discharge Reports, NYPD has recorded 117 “subjects shot and killed by officers” between 2004 and 2014. Its total of 13 shooting deaths for 2006, however, exceeded the 10 reported to the FBI that year, the only 12-month period in which the department participated in the FBI’s count.

NYPD’s own counts also did not include non-shooting deaths such as Garner’s. By contrast a more comprehensive count of incidents and details of the demographics of the people involved would be “a huge help in this so-called ‘push to improve police relations with the Black community’,” said Erica Garner.

Florida keeps its own annual record of justifiable homicides by law enforcement, despite no departments in the state filing a report to the FBI in the past decade. The state data from 2013 was provided to the Guardian but did not list the departments responsible for each death, instead it recorded a single, statewide figure of 60 deaths from all departments who submitted records that year. NBC South Florida was provided with records dating back over a decade, showing the number of recorded justifiable homicides has risen from 14 in 1999 to 67 in 2012.

Departments behind some of last year’s most controversial homicides by police, including Cleveland and Beavercreek in Ohio, whose officers shot dead 12-year-old Tamir Rice and 22-year-old John Crawford respectively, also did not file reports on those incidents to the FBI.

A review of data collected over the years by the FBI showed that high-profile homicides in which officers were found to be at fault were not recorded or were logged inconsistently. Problems stem from the fact that only one of the FBI’s 32 classifications for all homicides – which are precise enough to include “child killed by babysitter” and homicides linked to gambling – makes reference to the person who carried out the homicide being a police officer. This classification, “felon killed by police”, is automatically counted as a justifiable homicide.

Apparently because the FBI offers no category for recording killings by law enforcement officers of people who were not felons, some departments have filed unjustified homicides by their officers among the general stack of murders, manslaughters and other killings between civilians.

A record matching the case of Yvette Smith, a 47-year-old black woman who was shot dead by Bastrop County deputy Daniel Willis in Texas when she opened the door to him, appeared among the general unjustified homicides for 2014. As a result, it was not included in the total figure for killings by police publicised by the FBI last month. The death was filed under “circumstances undetermined” and Willis was logged as a stranger to Smith rather than an officer. A prosecution of Willis on charges of murder recently ended in a mistrial.

Similarly Jonathan Ferrell, a 24-year-old former football player at Florida A&M who was shot dead by officer Randall Kerrick after knocking on a door when he crashed his car in North Carolina, appeared to be included among general homicides for 2013. But his death was categorised as “manslaughter by negligence” and Kerrick was recorded as having been known to the victim. A trial of Kerrick for voluntary manslaughter also ended in a hung jury.

Yet no record in either file – homicides by police officers and those by civilians – could be found that matched other major cases, including that of Oscar Grant, the 22-year-old black man shot dead at a transit station in Oakland, California, in January 2009. Grant’s death was dramatised in the film Fruitvale Station. Officer Johannes Mehserle, who said he meant to use a Taser, was found guilty of involuntary manslaughter but cleared of murder.

No entries appeared for Rekia Boyd, a 22-year-old woman shot dead by an off-duty Chicago police officer in March 2012, nor for Malissa Williams, 30, and Timothy Russell, 43, who died after 137 shots were fired into their car by police officers in Cleveland, Ohio in November the same year.

The FBI has also logged incorrect information for several deaths. Among these was the case of Darrien Hunt, a 22-year-old who was shot dead in September last year while running away from police in Saratoga Springs, Utah, after allegedly wielding a replica sword. Hunt was listed as the person who carried out the homicide, and a knife or blade was said to be the deadly weapon. Hunt and the officers who shot him were listed as acquaintances.

Hunt’s mother, Susan, said the confused logging of her son’s death came even after federal officials said earlier this year that the FBI and Department of Justice were carrying out their own review of the fatal shooting. “There has been so much wrong with the entire incident,” she said.

Fischer, the FBI spokesman, said departments had until December to submit missing or corrected data and said the information analysed by the Guardian for 2014 was “a snapshot in time” that may be updated.

A knife was also listed as the fatal weapon for a case matching the details of Chieu-di Thi Vo, a 47-year-old woman shot dead by a Greensboro, North Carolina, police officer in March last year after allegedly brandishing a knife. Vo’s demographic information was given for both the person who was killed and the officer who carried out the homicide, who was in fact a man. The FBI’s final published tally counted only one homicide by a blade, but did not state which this was.

The Counted has documented more than 900 deaths caused by encounters with law enforcement officers so far this year. The FBI count, from which basic statistics were published earlier this month, documented just 444 justifiable homicides for the whole of 2014. That total was reached by the Guardian count before the halfway point of 2015.

The FBI data showed that while the number of departments reporting killings by their officers rose 14% from 196 per year in 2009 to 224 last year, the number of homicides increased by 12% from 392 to 439 per year in the same period.

Because of the nature of the FBI program there is no way of calculating whether these increases reflect a genuine rise in the number of people killed by police over the years or simply that more agencies have decided to submit their data.

Comey said last week that it was “unacceptable” the Guardian and the Washington Post were “becoming the lead source of information about violent encounters between police and civilians”.

“You can get online today and figure out how many tickets were sold to ‘The Martian,’ which I saw this weekend … The CDC can do the same with the flu,” Comey said. “It’s ridiculous – it’s embarrassing and ridiculous – that we can’t talk about crime in the same way, especially in the high-stakes incidents when your officers have to use force.”

From The Guardian

It is has been nearly one year since a police officer shot and killed 12-year-old Tamir Rice while he was playing with a toy gun in a neighborhood park in Cleveland, Ohio. Criminal charges have yet to be brought against either of the officers involved in the killing: the shooter, Timothy Loehmann, and his partner, Frank Garmback.

This weekend the Cuyahoga County Prosecutor’s office published on its web site two supposedly independent reports which both conclude that the police murder of Rice was “objectively reasonable.”

The reports are transparent efforts to deny the obvious. Surveillance videoshows that the police officers rolled up to the young boy in their squad car and opened fire in less than two seconds. Rice, who was struck once in the stomach, was left by the officers to bleed on the ground without any first aid for at least four minutes. He died the next day at the hospital.

The reports, prepared by a former FBI agent and a current district attorney at the request of the prosecutor, Thomas J. McGinty, were presented to a secret grand jury that has been impaneled to decide whether or not to bring charges against Loehmann and Garmback. The outrageous decision by McGinty to selectively release reports favorable to the officers has all the markings of an attempt to whitewash the crime and condition public opinion for an exoneration.

The likelihood of Rice’s killers being charged with a crime and put on trial is extremely low; if they are brought to trial, the odds of a conviction are even lower.

While police killings are a more than daily occurrence in the United States, with most going unreported in the media, prosecutions and convictions are extremely rare. A report by the Washington Post earlier this year found that, over the past decade, only 54 officers have been charged for a fatal shooting. Of these, only 11 have been convicted. In the last three years alone, nearly 3,000 people have been killed by police.

Among the most notable exonerations in recent months was the decision by a judge in May to acquit another Cleveland, Ohio police officer, Michael Brelo, of manslaughter charges in the deaths of two unarmed individuals who were killed in a barrage of more than 130 rounds fired into their car. Last month, a local prosecutor announced that Pasco, Washington police officers would not be charged for gunning down an unarmed immigrant worker, Antonio Zambrano-Montes, in February.

These actions followed the decisions not to charge Darren Wilson, the police officer who killed Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri in August 2014, and Daniel Pantaleo, the cop who choked Eric Garner to death in July of the same year.

The latest developments in the Rice case fit into a definite modus operandi of the ruling class as it seeks to tamp down social discontent in the face of unrelenting police violence.

After a police officer commits a horrific killing, public outrage finds expression in mass protests in which justice is demanded in the form of a trial and conviction. Democratic Party politicians make disingenuous statements of concern for the deceased and promise to make serious changes that will rein in the police violence. Finally, efforts are made to prepare public opinion to accept the exoneration of the killer cop, and the killing goes on.

In instances where protests threaten to escape the control of the Democratic Party and its auxiliary organizations, the state has responded with brutal repression—as in the military-style lockdowns in Ferguson following the killing of Michael Brown and in Baltimore, Maryland this spring after the killing of Freddie Gray.

The Obama administration has played a key role in this process. The administration has given the green light for police killings to continue apace, refusing to bring civil rights charges in multiple cases and intervening on behalf of the police in every police brutality case brought before the Supreme Court. While there has been talk about addressing the militarization of local police forces, nothing in fact has been done to limit the military grade equipment held by police departments, including combat rifles, armored vehicles and drones.

At the same time, the protests and popular anger over police violence have been actively channeled behind the Democratic Party through the intervention of groups like Black Lives Matter and other proponents of identity politics. The function of these organizations has been to obscure the fundamental class questions at stake, insisting that the issue of police violence is entirely a matter of racism.

They claim that police violence can be opposed by appealing to the Obama administration or hiring more black police officers. They ignore the fact that the majority of victims of police violence in the US are white, and that the regularity of police killings is not altered by the racial composition of either the police or the politicians who preside over them.

In fact, the unending series of police killings has much deeper roots. It is the festering sore of a society riven by social inequality, presided over by a ruling class that wages unending war abroad and is increasingly utilizing the methods of war to deal with social tensions within the country. The police are a critical instrument of the corporate and financial elite in the defense of its social system, capitalism.

If one conclusion can be drawn from the experience of the last year of police killings and protests, it is that the Democratic Party and the purveyors of racial identity politics have proven to be a dead end for the working class in the fight against police violence.

Young people are angry and outraged by an increasingly unbearable situation and are looking for a way to fight. They understand that a society that seeks to justify the police murder of a child and hundreds of others is morally bankrupt and completely irrational.

The experiences with police violence and the response to mass protests over the last year have made it clear to a growing number of youth and workers that the fundamental question of police violence is one of class. As one worker in Ferguson recently told the WSWS, “It’s not about black or white, it’s about rich or poor and everybody that’s at a certain income level, we need to get together.”

To fight against police violence, this widespread class sentiment must be given conscious political form. Opposition to the brutality of the state must be connected to the growing struggles of workers of all races, throughout the country and internationally, against the relentless attack waged by the corporations and the banks. It means the political unification of the entire working class, on the basis of a revolutionary and socialist program, against the Democratic and Republican parties and the capitalist system they defend.

Niles Williamson for https://www.wsws.org

CLEVELAND, Ohio — A judge in Cleveland ruled Thursday that probable cause existed to charge two Cleveland police officers in the death of a 12-year-old boy, Tamir Rice, but also said he did not have the power to order the arrests without a complaint being filed by a prosecutor.

This week, a group of activists and community leaders asked the Municipal Court to have the officers, Timothy Loehmann and Frank Garmback, arrested under a little-used Ohio law that allows “a private citizen having knowledge of the facts” to start the process by filing an affidavit with a court. They argued that the widely seen video of an officer killing Tamir had given nearly everyone “knowledge of the facts.”

On Thursday, Judge Ronald B. Adrine issued an order saying that probable cause existed to charge the officers, and “this court determines that complaints should be filed by the prosecutor of the City of Cleveland and/or the Cuyahoga County prosecutor.” What weight the order carries with the prosecutors is unclear.

The ruling puts prosecutors in a difficult position, deciding whether to bring charges in a high-profile case when a judge has already said that probable cause exists to do so.

In a statement, the Cuyahoga County prosecutor, Timothy J. McGinty, said the case, “as with all other fatal use of deadly force cases involving law enforcement officers, will go to the grand jury.”

Ultimately, Mr. McGinty said, any decision to file charges will rest with the members of a grand jury.

The petitioners argued that the statute allowed ordinary citizens to bypass the police and prosecutors, and force arrests; if they showed probable cause that a crime had been committed, they said, then the court had no choice but to order the officers arrested.

But the judge said there was a conflict between the law and the rules laid down by the State Supreme Court, so he could not issue warrants without a prosecutor’s complaint.

In his ruling, the judge found that probable cause existed to charge Officer Loehmann, who fired the shots that killed Tamir, with murder, involuntary manslaughter, reckless homicide or dereliction of duty. The judge also ruled that probable cause existed to charge Office Garmback, who drove the police car, with negligent homicide or dereliction of duty.

Tamir was fatally shot in November while he played in a park. A 911 caller had reported that the boy was waving a gun that was “probably fake.” When officers arrived, they pulled their car into the park, next to the boy. Within two seconds, Officer Loehmann had shot Tamir in the abdomen. The gun, it turned out, was a lifelike, airsoft-style gun, which fired plastic pellets.

The Rev. Jawanza K. Colvin, a Cleveland pastor who filed affidavits in the case, said that the findings of probable cause showed that residents could have their concerns taken seriously by the courts.

“It is a step, and it is a step that tells those who have continued to work for justice in the criminal justice system that all lives do matter,” Mr. Colvin said.

A lawyer for the Rice family, Walter Madison, said Tamir’s relatives were “overwhelmed” by the findings and “cannot believe that the system has actually worked in their favor.”

“Albeit a small step toward justice, it is a step nonetheless,” Mr. Madison said.

“The order said that warrants should be filed, and I think that puts the onus on another set of public servants to listen to the people,” Mr. Madison said. “I think anything but an indictment at this particular time calls into serious question the county prosecutor and the appearance of impropriety.”

 This story originally written by Richard Pérez-Peña for the New York Times

It’s been nearly six months since a Cleveland police officer shot and killed 12-year-old Tamir Rice as he played in a park — and county investigators have yet to question the two cops involved in the shooting, according to a report from Mother Jones’s Jaeah Lee.

On November 22, Rice was throwing snowballs and playing with an airsoft gun when a man called 911 because he thought Rice was behaving suspiciously, although he noted the boy’s gun was “probably fake.” Within two seconds of arriving on the scene and getting out of his squad car, officer Timothy Loehmann shot Rice, who died in the hospital the next day. The entire encounter was caught on video, which shows Rice lying on the ground for four minutes before he got any medical care — and that care only came from an FBI agent who happened to be in the area.

The Cuyahoga County Sheriff’s Office took over the investigation into the shooting in January. But the investigation has dragged on, now taking longer than the queries into the police killings of Eric Garner, Michael Brown, Freddie Gray, and Walter Scott.

But in all that time, Mother Jones reported, the sheriff’s office hasn’t questioned Loehmann, who shot the young black boy, or Frank Garmback, the officer who drove the squad car.

As they wait for answers, the Rice family has suffered. Rice’s mom, Samaria Rice, reportedly lived in a homeless shelter for some time because “she could no longer live next door to the killing field of her son.” The family also couldn’t bury Rice’s body for more than five months — in case it was needed for the investigation — but over the past week the family announcedthat he was recently cremated.

The sheriff’s office has said that a majority of its work is complete and a resolution should come in the coming weeks. Investigators will turn over the evidence to a grand jury, which will decide whether to press charges. Depending on the decision, local officials are preparing for protests on the scale of those in Baltimore and Ferguson, Missouri, after Freddie Gray and Michael Brown’s deaths.

Watch: Why it is important to watch the police

Relatives of a 12-year-old boy who was killed by police asked Monday for their lawsuit against two officers to not be delayed and questioned why the criminal investigation remains pending more than five months after the shooting.

Tamir Rice was carrying an airsoft gun that uses nonlethal plastic pellets when an officer shot him outside a recreation center in November.

The officers who confronted him have asked a judge to delay the family’s federal civil rights lawsuit until the investigation is complete and potentially works its way through the courts. They said that would let them give their side of the story later without worrying it might be used against them in the criminal case.

The family’s attorneys objected to a delay in a court filing Monday, arguing that proceeding with the lawsuit wouldn’t cause prejudice for the officers but would increase legal costs and the emotional harm for Tamir’s family. His body still hasn’t been laid to rest, and his mother, Samaria Rice, moved to a homeless shelter because she couldn’t live so close to where her son was shot, the court filing said.

One of her attorneys, Benjamin Crump, questioned why the investigation is still pending despite the confrontation being captured on surveillance video that showed the officer firing within two seconds of a police car stopping near Tamir.

“Less than a second, my son is gone — and I want to know how long I got to wait for justice,” his mother said at a news conference.

A police union official has said the officer had no way of knowing Tamir wasn’t carrying a real firearm.

Cuyahoga County’s sheriff’s office, which took over the investigation, declined to comment Monday.

Crump noted that the investigation has lasted longer than the work of a task force created by Gov. John Kasich in December to examine community-police relations in Ohio. Tamir’s relatives and their attorneys were speaking about a mile from where Kasich and other members of the panel were discussing its recommendations Monday

The shooting of Tamir, who was black, by a white officer has raised questions about how police treat blacks and has spurred protests around the city. The county prosecutor has said the case will be presented to a grand jury for possible charges.

Timothy Loehmann, the Cleveland police officer who shot and killed Tamir Rice, and his partner Frank Garmback are asking a federal judge to halt a lawsuit filed against them until the criminal investigation — and possible prosecution — into their actions is completed.

In a motion filed Monday afternoon by city attorneys, both officers seek to protect their Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination.

Halting the complaint until the criminal case is over would mean that Loehmann and Garmback can give depositions and testify at trial “without fear that their answers may be used against them in a separate criminal proceeding, where the stakes are significantly higher and their liberty is directly at risk,” the motion says.

The Cuyahoga County Sheriff’s Department is investigating whether Loehmann, who fatally shot Tamir, 12, at Cudell Recreation Center on Nov. 22, and Garmback committed any criminal actions. After the investigation, the Cuyahoga County Prosecutor’s Office is expected to present the case to a grand jury to determine whether charges are warranted.

Prosecutor’s office spokeswoman Reanna Karousis said Monday that her office does not have a timetable for when it will receive a completed investigation.

In their motion, Loehmann and Garmback also say that putting the lawsuit on hold would ensure that the separate investigations would not prejudice each other.

“Here, it is undisputed the Cuyahoga County Sheriff’s Office is investigating Officer Garmback and Officer Loehmann about the same incident that is the subject of this civil action,” the motion reads. “If civil discovery were to proceed simultaneously at the same time, therefore, it would unduly interfere with the integrity of the criminal proceedings.”

It also says that “the public’s interest lies in the orderly prosecution of those who are accused of violating the state’s laws.”

The lawsuit was first filed in December and amended in January after Tamir’s family hired new attorneys. Tamir’s parents, Samaria Rice and Leonard Warner, were added as plaintiffs, as was his sister Tajai Rice.

It alleges the city, Loehmann, Garmback and 100 unknown 911 operators, police officers and city employees violated the family’s rights in the fatal Nov. 22 shooting. The boy was shot less than two seconds after the officers pulled up to the gazebo at the recreation center on West Boulevard.

Officers responded to a report of a man with a gun. The boy was holding a pellet gun.

The city has denied the family’s allegations and said that “contributory and/or comparative negligence” led to Tamir’s death and their family’s pain and suffering.

The officers have not formally responded to the Rice family’s lawsuit. Though their responses are due April 27, they are also asking the judge to allow them to wait until after their other request is addressed.

In an effort to be transparent and address what they called a shocking response from the City of Cleveland about the death of Tamir Rice, the attorneys for the 12-year-old’s family revealed the boy was shot in less than a second outside of a recreation center on Nov. 22.

During a press conference on Tuesday, attorneys Benjamin Crump and Walter Madison replayed part of the authorities’ surveillance video — previously released in November — that was synchronized with a stopwatch. The footage shows that, from the time the police cruiser stopped moving to when Rice was shot, Officer Timothy Loehmann fired his weapon in 0.792 seconds.

“In less than a second, they made a decision to shoot. If that’s not escalation, I don’t know how you decide,” said Crump, who represented the families in other high-profile cases, including relatives of Trayvon Martin in Florida and Michael Brown in Missouri.

The press conference took place four days after the City of Cleveland blamed Rice and his family for the boy’s death. The injuries alleged by the child and his family “were directly and proximately caused by their own acts, not this Defendant,” the city wrote in a court filing on Friday.

The City of Cleveland responded to a lawsuit filed by the family of Tamir Rice by doing what governments often do: blaming the victim for the actions of the oppressor.

In their response, the City claimed that the injuries and subsequent death of Tamir Rice and his family “were directly and proximately caused by their own acts, not this Defendant” and  “by the failure … to exercise due care to avoid injury.”

In the full response, the City of Cleveland details 20 defenses but the overall conclusion is that Rice died due to “the conduct of individuals or entities other than Defendant.”

Walter Madison, an Akron attorney representing the Rice family, said Friday that he believes “that there’s merit in our complaint.”

“I do believe that a 12-year-old child died unnecessarily at the hands of Cleveland police officers and I do believe that certain officers shouldn’t have been entitled to wear the uniform,” he said.