On November 22, 2014, 12-year-old Tamir Rice is shot dead by police officers in Cleveland, Ohio. Rice, who was carrying a realistic-looking toy gun at the time, was one of several African Americans killed by American law enforcement at the time whose deaths garnered national attention, making him a martyr of the burgeoning Black Lives Matter movement.

Rice was playing with an Airsoft plastic pellet gun at the Cudell Recreation Center in Cleveland on the afternoon of the 22nd. An observer called the police to report him, specifically mentioning that the gun was likely a toy and that Rice appeared to be a minor. The police dispatcher, however, simply told Officers Timothy Loehmann and Frank Garmback that the suspect had a gun. Loehmann and Garmback arrived on the scene and shot Rice in a matter of seconds. Issuing an opinion that both officers should be charged with homicide, a judge would later write, "this court is still thunderstruck by how quickly this event turned deadly." The boy died of his wounds the next day.

Despite the judge's opinion, a grand jury declined to charge either officer. The killing of Rice came a few months after the killings of Eric Garner and Michael Brown by police in New York City and Ferguson, Missouri, respectively; two days after the killing of unarmed Akai Gurley by the NYPD; and just two days before a grand jury declined to indict the officer who killed Brown. This spate of police killings, many of which were caught on camera and seen by millions of people, led to civil unrest throughout the United States and drew public attention to the excesses of American law enforcement. In 2017, the Cleveland police fired Loehmann, the officer who killed Rice, not for the shooting but for failing to disclose that he had previously been declared emotionally unfit for duty while working for a different police department.