CLEVELAND — It began with a swap: one boy’s cellphone for another’s replica of a Colt pistol.
One of the boys went to play in a nearby park, striking poses with the lifelike, airsoft-style gun, which fired plastic pellets. He threw a snowball, settled down at a picnic table and flopped his head onto his arms in a perfect assertion of preteen ennui, a grainy security video shows.
Then, with the gun tucked away, he walked to the edge of the gazebo. He might have been wandering aimlessly, or he might have been attracted by the sight of a squad car barreling across the lawn.
Seconds later, the boy lay dying from a police officer’s bullet. “Shots fired, male down,” one of the officers in the car called across his radio. “Black male, maybe 20, black revolver, black handgun by him. Send E.M.S. this way, and a roadblock.”
But the boy, Tamir Rice, was only 12. Now, with the county sheriff’s office reviewing the shooting, interviews and recently released video and police records show how a series of miscommunications, tactical errors and institutional failures by the Cleveland police cascaded into one irreversible mistake.
And in death last November, Tamir joined Michael Brown, a teenager fatally shot by a police officer in Ferguson, Mo., and Eric Garner, a Staten Island man who died after being placed in a chokehold by an officer, as touchstones for protests of police violence against unarmed black people across the nation. Their names were chanted by demonstrators again on Monday in Martin Luther King Jr. Day marches.
Because of multiple layers in Cleveland’s 911 system, crucial information from the initial call about “a guy in here with a pistol” was never relayed to the responding police officers, including the caller’s caveats that the gun was “probably fake” and that the wielder was “probably a juvenile.”
What the officers, Frank Garmback and his rookie partner, Tim Loehmann, did hear from a dispatcher was, “We have a Code 1,” the department’s highest level of urgency.
When the officers raced into action, they took a shortcut that pointed their squad car straight into the park, pulling up so close to Tamir that it made it difficult to take cover, or to use verbal persuasion or other tactics suggested by the department’s use-of-force policy.
Within two seconds of the car’s arrival, Officer Loehmann shot Tamir in the abdomen from point-blank range, raising doubts that he could have warned the boy three times to raise his hands, as the police later claimed.
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Waiting for Answers
In the weeks since Tamir’s death, the city and its police department have come under mounting pressure to explain not only the shooting, but also its aftermath, with the officers failing to provide first aid as Tamir lay bleeding. Not until an F.B.I. agent who happened to be nearby arrived four minutes after the shooting did anyone tend to the boy.
Though the department’s use-of-force policy requires officers to “obtain necessary medical assistance” for injured people, it does not explicitly call for them to perform first aid. Walter Madison, a lawyer for Tamir’s mother, said it would be ludicrous to believe that officers would not immediately perform first aid on a wounded comrade.
Henry Hilow, a lawyer representing Officer Loehmann, said the officers had followed protocol by calling for E.M.S., saying, “They were doing the best they could to get medical attention” for Tamir. He also defended the officers’ tactics in the moments before the shooting, saying they had positioned their cruiser to prevent Tamir from running into the recreation center, where they thought he might endanger people. They tried to stop farther away, but the car skidded, Mr. Hilow said.
Echoing the defense of the police department after the shooting, Mr. Hilow also said the officers had seen Tamir pull the pellet gun out of his waistband moments before Officer Loehmann shot him, an account that is difficult to verify with the low-quality security video. He said the officers had shouted at Tamir to drop the gun and show his hands before their squad car came to a stop.
The department has begun taking some steps to address its problems. It says it will review personnel files of all new hires. A city inquiry may also examine the dispatch system, in which, Detective Loomis said, the person who took the 911 call did not relay the caller’s caveats to the dispatcher.
Yet Mayor Frank G. Jackson, a Democrat in his third term, has insisted there is no “systemic failure” in the department, and has steadfastly resisted calls for the resignation of two top advisers who oversaw the department during the period studied by both the state and the Justice Department.
Ms. Rice, 38, is awaiting explanations, and an apology. “Nobody has come to knock on my door and told me what happened,” she said. “Somebody has to be held accountable.”
A version of this article appears in print on January 23, 2015, on page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: Many Errors by Cleveland Police, Then a Fatal One. Order Reprints| Today’s Paper|Subscribe
