DETROIT, MI — The story just gets worse. Video released more than a month ago showed a white cop in Cleveland shooting Tamir Rice, an African American 12-year-old playing with a pellet gun, within seconds of approaching him. Last week, extended video obtained by the Northeast Ohio Media Group showed what happened afterward: Two police officers stood by without offering aid to the wounded boy—he didn’t die until nine hours later in the hospital—and also tackled and handcuffed Rice’s 14-year-old sister when she tried to reach her brother’s side.
It’s a serious development in an ongoing story, and it confirms the version of events described by Rice’s mother at a Dec. 8 press conference. It’s also an unfortunate addendum to the U.S. Justice Department’s two-year investigation into the Cleveland Police Department, which faulted city cops for reckless behavior that escalated the danger of potentially nonviolent encounters.
We came down pretty hard last month on NEOMG, the digital sibling of the Cleveland Plain Dealer, for flaws in its coverage of the Rice story. We should also give credit where it’s due: NEOMG was persistent in seeking the footage and committed resources to the effort. The extended video likely came to light more quickly than it would have otherwise.
Here is how they got it.
NEOMG filed an official public records request on Dec. 11 for the full footage, which was captured by a surveillance camera in a public park and so belonged to the city. The city denied that request, arguing that the video was part of an ongoing criminal investigation and therefore exempt from open-records laws.
“They know that these are days of limited resources for newsrooms, meaning we pick our battles,” Chris Quinn, NEOMG’s vice president for content, said in an email. “I think city lawyers were bluffing to see whether I was willing to spend the money and call in Dave.”
“Dave” is David Marburger, a Cleveland attorney and an expert on Ohio public records law. NEOMG worked with him when it sought the first video of the shooting, which called into question the account initially offered by police. Marburger was able to confirm for the city that Rice’s family wanted to see it released.
But was the second video confidential? No, said Marburger, because the surveillance camera was owned by the city, operated in a public park, and recorded continuously—that is, it wasn’t filming selectively as part of a police investigation that cops would reasonably not want to be made public. It is pure happenstance that it recorded the crime.
Marburger sent a letter to the city on Dec. 19, urging public officials to grant the records request filed by NEOMG reporter Cory Shaffer and citing from a book he had written on state records law. “Government records that were public record standing alone do not lose that public-record status merely because investigators assemble them in the course of investigating a law enforcement matter,” he wrote.
City lawyers were persuaded, according to NEOMG. But other obstacles delayed the release. “The city government is a bureaucracy … with many branches that must touch issues like this,” Quinn said. Getting various approvals and confirmations as the holidays arrived was slow going. There were also two other points of dispute: The city believed it would be breaking the law if the faces of juveniles in the video were not blurred out. “I persuaded them that was not the case by sending them another chapter in the book on exactly that,” Marburger said. “They checked that out and agreed with me.”
There were other issues to sort out too, like whether to blur out plainclothes officers who responded to the scene. (They were blurred.) Finally, the video was ready for release. But technical glitches on Dropbox, where the city wanted to place the video, caused yet more delays. Marburger spent a lot of time on the phone trying to figure out a delivery mechanism. At the same time, Quinn was getting impatient.
“I told Dave we were about to post a story about the city keeping the video secret in violation of the records law,” Quinn said. But Marburger didn’t want to see city lawyers castigated in print, because he felt they were making a genuine effort to release the video in difficult circumstances. “They were being attacked in a million different directions, and this was just one issue.”
He added, though, that he believed keeping the issue before the city hastened the release of the footage. “Under the circumstances, if we hadn’t persistently pestered them about the video, it wouldn’t have come out yet,” Marburger said.
Dan Williams, a spokesman for the city, said the city had received requests from many media outlets for extended footage, and had tried to release it to all simultaneously. Officials wanted to get the footage out, he said.
“The other reason we wanted to release it—and I myself wanted to release it much earlier—is because if you can release the video of him being shot, why can’t you release the whole thing?” Williams said. “That’s not really germane to the trail of evidence, in my view. Maximum disclosure, minimum delay. We’ve got to be transparent.”
Finally, Quinn said “on the day we were going to post a story about the fight,” the video made it to NEOMG. Shaffer published his story on the 30-minute footage on Jan. 7, and followed up with articles about how the Rice family and Cleveland Police Patrolmen’s Association responded to it.
In the latter, he states that NEOMG has “filed a public records request for the department’s general police orders on administering aid. City officials have not responded.”
Anna Clark is a journalist in Detroit. Her writing has appeared in ELLE Magazine, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Next City, and other publications. Anna edited A Detroit Anthology, a Michigan Notable Book, and she was a 2017 Knight-Wallace journalism fellow at the University of Michigan. She is the author of The Poisoned City: Flint’s Water and the American Urban Tragedy, published by Metropolitan Books, an imprint of Henry Holt. She is online at www.annaclark.net and on Twitter @annaleighclark.