Samaria Rice considers it her duty to inform the world every time the former Cleveland police officer who shot and killed her 12-year-old son, Tamir, in 2014 is hired in law enforcement in another city. That happened again in July.
“I don’t think he understands that he’s connected to Tamir forever, to his name,” Rice said at a City Club of Cleveland forum, “The Legacy of Tamir Rice,” on Friday, 10 years to the day after Tamir was shot. She was joined in the panel discussion by her cousin, LaTonya Goldsby, who is president of Black Lives Matter Cleveland, and her longtime attorney, Subodh Chandra.
Tamir was a typical pre-teen boy, an “all-American kid,” Rice recalled. He played soccer and basketball and rode his skateboard. But he also still loved toy trucks, Curious George and drawing.
“He was definitely a joker,” Goldsby added. “He liked to laugh and crack jokes a lot. But he was also very much a mama’s boy.” Her daughter and Tamir were born just seven days apart, “so our families were very close.”
Samaria talked about her work with the Tamir Rice Foundation and her efforts to open the Tamir Rice Afro-Centric Cultural Center to offer programs and mentoring for kids “to give back to the community.” But she also admitted to having considered leaving Cleveland for Chicago because of a lack of support.
The gazebo where Tamir was playing with a pellet gun when he was shot by Officer Timothy Loehmann, originally outside the Cudell Recreation Center, was disassembled in 2016 and rebuilt at a community arts center on the South Side of Chicago.
“I think people think I don’t know what I’m doing,” she said. “Cleveland is just reluctant to change … and to help a grassroots organization, and I don’t know why.”
Most of the hour was devoted to discussion of police reform. The consensus among the panelists and the audience members who spoke was that there has been some progress in Cleveland but not nearly enough.
Samaria Rice mentioned the Cleveland Community Police Commission’s 100 Years Project, which documents reform efforts from 1922 to the present. Its primary finding: “While some of the terminology has changed, the 462 paragraphs of the 2015 consent decree largely repeat the recommendations we have seen over the last 100 years.”
“You see better written policies and procedures” today, said Chandra. But he said he does not see evidence that they’re making a difference yet. He estimated that it will take “a generation, 25 to 30 years, to create a truly new culture of accountability” in the Cleveland Division of Police.
An audience member asked Samaria Rice what advice she would offer to other families who experience a tragedy like hers.
“You have to have the right people around you,” she said. “Search for people who can educate you and give you good advice.” She had never even attended a City Council meeting before Tamir’s death.
“And reach out to people like me.”