1. Six year ago today, 12-year-old Tamir Rice was playing by himself in the park. A deadly mix of neighborhood fear of gun violence, police fear of Blackness, and the adultification of Black children resulted in Cleveland police shooting him to death within seconds of arriving.
2. When the officer called in the report of shots fired, they described Tamir as a Black male, and guessed his age to be around 20. They robbed him of his life in part because, before that, they robbed him of his childhood.
3. Were Tamir alive today, he would be 18. The first anniversary of his murder for which he would legally have been an adult.
4. There is nothing we can do within the confines of policing to prevent that awful outcome from occurring again. The mechanisms are too deeply ingrained in the rest of our systems.
5. If we want to honor Tamir, and pevent Black children from fearing his fate, the project much be much *much* bigger than policing. The project must be as large as the gap between the innocence of his childhood and the guilt of the systems that killed him.
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