Cleveland to pay $6mln over police shooting of black boy

The US city of Cleveland on Monday reached a six million U.S. dollars settlement with the family of Tamir Rice, a 12-year-old black boy shot by police while playing with a toy gun.

The settlement is the latest in a series of seven-figure payouts by major American cities to the families of African-Americans who died at the hands of police, said a New York Times report.

An order filed in U.S. District Court in Cleveland in the state of Ohio, said the city will pay out three million dollars this year and three million dollars next.

However, under the terms of the settlement, Cleveland does not admit any wrongdoing, local media reported, citing details of the accord which still requires the approval of a probate court.

"The resolution is nothing to celebrate because a 12-year-old child needlessly lost his life," said the family's attorney Subodh Chandra.

Tamir Rice was gunned down outside a recreation center on Nov. 23, 2014 by Timothy Loehmann, a white police officer who was responding to a 911 emergency call about a man pointing a gun at people in the center.

But it later turned out that Tamir was only playing with an air-soft gun that he borrowed from a friend. The gun looked like a real gun, but it can only fire nonlethal plastic pellets.

A grand jury in Cleveland acquitted Loehmann in December last year, claiming the evidence did not indicate criminal conduct by police.

However, a series of cases in which U.S. police officers shot dead black civilians but were not indicted over the recent years have again and again raised doubts over their excessive use of deadly force and racial discrimination.

A series of high-profile killings of black people by police officers across the United States since mid-2014 triggered waves of protest nationwide and fueled a civil rights movement -- Black Lives Matter, which was active in the 8-day protest before Capitol Hill against big money in politics earlier this month.

A total of 965 American civilians were shot and killed by U.S. police in 2015, and unarmed black men were six times as likely as whites to be shot dead by police, according to a Washington Post report.

Only nine percent of the shootings, or 90 cases, involved unarmed civilians, but the victims were disproportionately black, according to the Post's analysis.

Although black men make up only six percent of the U.S. population, they account for 40 percent, or 36 cases, of the unarmed people shot to death by police in 2015.

The Post also found that a hugely disproportionate number -- three in five -- of those killed by police after exhibiting less threatening behavior were black or Hispanic.

Source: XINHUA