Kasich says those outraged by police shooting ‘need to be heard’

Ohio Gov. John Kasich, the closest we get to a moderate in the 2016 presidential race, again showed that he’s a different breed of Republican compared to the rest of the GOP field in response to the shocking decision on Monday not to indict a Cleveland police officer who shot and killed a child playing with a toy gun.

"You need to be heard," Kasich said to those back home in Ohio outraged by the decision in the Tamir Rice case. After a campaign event on Tuesday in New Hampshire the governor said, "In America, we’re a place that was born in the area of protesting. Protesting is an American way of life."

But Kasich, according to The Washington Post, urged people upset by the decision to demonstrate peacefully. "We just want to make sure that the protests don’t slip into something that sets everybody back. Because in the community of Cleveland, we have had great gains made, economically, not for everybody, but for a lot of people. It’s not by chance that the Republican convention is going to Cleveland. Why is it going there? Because when (party leaders) went to Cleveland, they could not believe the turnaround and they couldn’t believe the progress. So we don’t want to go backwards."

As part of the state's response, Kasich said officials are preparing to review police dispatching protocol to find ways to improve communication between dispatchers and officers in the field.

"We can raise the standards of dispatchers. We can bring higher-quality standards or understand their problems," he said, adding that studies have proposed establishing national standards for communication between officers and dispatchers back at police stations.

The Post’s Ed O’Keefe reports that the governor again declined to comment on the grand jury's decision not to indict Officer Timothy Loehmann, who opened fire on Rice, after a year-long investigation into a police shooting that was one of several to spark national protests.

But Kasich has no problem with the Justice Department's decision to continue investigating allegations of misconduct across the Cleveland police force.