Dec 12, 2014 4 min read

Editorial voices from newspapers around the country as compiled by the Associated Press:

Twelve-year-old Tamir Rice of Cleveland probably would be alive today had he not brandished a realistic-looking gun when challenged by a police officer.

Rice’s death is the most recent in a string of senseless deaths of children killed because law enforcement officers thought the “toys” they had were real, deadly firearms.

An investigation into Rice’s death was launched. It may reveal the two police officers involved could have dealt with the boy without shooting him. Again, however, there is no doubt no shots would have been fired had Rice not been at a playground with a realistic-looking pistol.

It turns out the boy was carrying a replica pistol meant to fire soft pellets. Someone had removed an orange band around the barrel, meant to distinguish the gun from a real firearm.

Police said when they told Rice to raise his hands, he instead grabbed the pistol. At that point, he was shot.

How many more children have to die in similar situations before parents stop allowing their children to take real-looking “toy” guns out in public?

If you are buying Christmas gifts for a youngster this year, steer away from such “toys.” At the very least, don’t let a child take one out in public. There is no reason – none at all – to expose a youngster to that danger.

It is a long-established and basic reality of law enforcement in America: Prosecutors who want an indictment get an indictment. In 2010 alone, federal prosecutors sought indictments in 162,000 cases. All but 11 times, they succeeded.

Yet, the results are entirely different when police officers kill unarmed civilians. In those cases, the officers are almost never prosecuted either because district attorneys do not pursue charges in the first place or grand juries do not indict, as happened most recently in Ferguson, Mo., and Staten Island.

There are various explanations for this, but the most obvious is the inherent conflict of interest that exists for prosecutors, who rely heavily on the police every day. Cops arrest suspects; they investigate crimes; they gather evidence; and they testify in court, working essentially in partnership with prosecutors.

Whether or not bias can be proved in a given case, the public perception of it is real and must be addressed.

The best solution would be a law that automatically transfers to an independent prosecutor all cases in which a civilian is dead at the hands of the police. This would avoid the messy politics of singling out certain district attorneys and taking cases away from them.

The police should be among the strongest supporters of this arrangement because both their authority and their safety are undermined when the communities they work in neither trust them nor believe that they are bound by the same laws as everyone else.

Today’s young adults are less likely to have been married than their counterparts from 1980 and are more likely to live in poverty despite being more likely to have a college degree.

Oh, and they’re more likely to speak with a foreign accent, having been born somewhere other than the United States.

Those demographics will put an interesting spin on the coming debate on immigration, provided Congress actually gets down to one.

According to the U.S. Census Bureau’s latest statistics from the American Community Survey, the percentage of young adults today who are foreign born has more than doubled since 1980 – 15 percent vs. 6 percent. All states have higher proportions of foreign-born young adults than 30 years ago.

Most politicians know which way the wind blows, whether or not they intend to be influenced by the gusts. Too hard a line on the immigration issue may turn out to be a good way to alienate an important voting bloc.