TAMIR RICE, a 12-year-old boy shot dead by police in a Cleveland playground in 2014, was denied justice on Tuesday when it was announced that the two officers involved will not face criminal charges.

The US Justice Department closed the case and said that there was insufficient evidence for a prosecution.

It insisted that the quality of the video footage of the shooting was too poor to prove conclusively what had happened.

Tamir was shot dead by police officer Timothy Lohemann as he played with a toy gun in a playground after a man drinking beer at a bus stop called the emergency services number to warn that someone was threatening passers-by.

The witness told call handlers that the gun was likely to be a fake and that the person was probably a juvenile, but that information was not passed on to officers.

The Justice Department said in a six-page-statement that because of this, “the officers believed they were responding to a playground where a grown man was brandishing a real gun at individuals, presumably children.”

The decision comes five years after an Ohio grand jury cleared Mr Loehmann and his partner Frank Garmback of state charges over Tamir’s death.

Lawyer for the boy’s family Subodh Chandra said that the “process is tainted” as they had been denied justice over the killing of their son.

“Justice for the family would be to prosecute the officers who killed their child,” Mr Chandra said. “The Rice family has been cheated of a fair process yet again.”

Mr Loehmann consistently claimed to have instructed Tamir to raise his hands and drop the gun and claimed that he saw the child reaching for a weapon before opening fire. But this account is disputed by Mr Chandra.

“It’s beyond comprehension that the department couldn’t recognise that an officer who claims he shouted commands when the patrol car’s window was closed and it was a winter day is lying,” he said.

The decision has provoked an angry backlash, with one Twitter user saying: “The lynching has never stopped. My heart goes out to Tamir Rice’s family.”

Black Lives Matter activist Grande Capo said: “I don’t see people talking about how the Justice Department allowed police to get away with killing a 12-year-old today. This is a problem. If America isn’t outraged, this it’s because the distractions are working or nobody really cared.”

Others simply said: “Tamir deserved more, he deserved life,” while arguing that the decision highlighted the need for reform of a broken police and judicial system.

The boy’s shooting is the latest case in which white police officers have escaped justice for killing black people.

The department also failed to bring criminal charges over the high-profile killings of Eric Garner in New York City and Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri.

The decision in the Tamir Rice case has been described by some as “the last racist act” of the Trump administration and Attorney General William Barr.