“If they had taken one moment to look and survey the scene, they would have seen that none of the kids were running away because none of them felt that they were in any danger,” Blow said on CNN Tonight. “Before you shoot somebody, you need to take a breath to say, ‘Let me assess the situation, let me not jump out with my hand on the trigger and shoot somebody at point-blank.’”

Those were Charles Blow’s words when he was on a panel discussion to talk about how there were no criminal charges issued in the Tamir Rice police shooting.

Blow, a New York Times columnist, dismantled the argument in 37 seconds on CNN Tonight that the Cleveland police officers Timothy Loehmann and Frank Garback made in a statement about Tamir Rice to the grand jury in Cuyahoga County, Ohio.

A brief section of the statement is repeated below:

“With his hands pulling the gun out and his elbow coming up, I knew it was a gun and it was coming out. I saw the weapon in his hands coming out of his waistband and the threat to my partner and myself was real and active.”

Tamir Rice was shot and killed on November 22, 2014 by police officers who thought that his toy pellet gun was a real gun. The grand jury made the decision not to indict the officers on December 28, 2015, which led to protests and uproar from activists.

As of now, the Cleveland Brand of NAACP is planning to file a request to release the grand jury testimony in the police shooting death of Tamir Rice. Currently, a prosecutor has rejected it because the release would put the members of the jury at risk.

H/T US Uncut

(Photo Credit: CNN Tonight Twitter/video screenshot)