No, of course the police rookie who shot Tamir Rice was not indicted.

Yes, I thought this one might actually be different.    A rookie policeman, who had a badly flawed training record, including failure of several training tests and one trainer's assessment that he did not have the temperament for a police officer.   Yet he had recently been hired by a neighboring police department that didn't bother to check his records.

There's more.  A 12 year old boy playing in the park with his toy gun.    A surveillance video that contradicted the rookie's story by showing him firing at Tamir Rice even before the squad car came to a halt -- proving that his claim to have repeatedly warned him to drop his gun was a lie.    And no attempt to give first aid to the fatally wounded boy lying on the ground -- and brutally throwing his distraught sister into the back of the squad car without an iota of compassion.

Yes, I thought a grand jury might find all this worthy of some further investigation under an indictment.    But that presumes that the grand jury heard what I just wrote above.   Instead, a sympathetic prosecutor presented the case to them in his own version, explaining the rookie policeman's fear that he was facing "a man with a gun" pointed at him.   The police rookie was allowed to give his story, without cross-examination.  No one spoke for the victim.

That is the grand jury system we have.  Yes, I understand that a grand jury is not a trial.  It is only to determine if there should be a trial.  But if there is no indictment, there will be no trial -- and the family of the victim will never have a change to question the shooter or to testify.   Instead, the prosecutor called it "a perfect storm of errors, mistakes and mis-communication" -- whitewashing the injustice rampant when our police confront black males.

Ralph