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The former Cleveland, Ohio, police officer who shot and killed 12-year-old Tamir Rice in 2014 has somehow managed to get hired as a cop again, this time as the sole member of the police department in Tioga, Pennsylvania, population 700. That’s still far too many people he might put in danger.
Tioga Mayor David Wilcox said he hadn’t actually had anything to do with the hiring of Timothy Loehmann, and that he was unaware of Loehmann’s background. Wilcox explained that all hiring and firing decisions were made by the borough council, and that he was under the impression that Loehmann had been vetted by the council. Also, what is a search engine, or these “inter nets” you big city folks speak of?
Also too, from Cleveland TV station WEWS, we learn that
The mayor said he sat in on Loehmann’s interview and his time in Cleveland came up but nothing was ever mentioned about his role in Tamir Rice’s death.
Here is a good tip for any small town seeking to hire a police officer: Just to be on the safe side, the interview should include at least one question along the lines of “Have you ever shot a 12-year-old child dead within two seconds of arriving on the scene?” It seems like a useful part of due diligence. It might be one way to stop the disturbing trend of bad cops failing upward into police chief jobs.
Read More: America Knows How To Handle Bad Cops: Make Them Police Chief!
And what a coincidence, that’s what would have been the payoff for Loehmann’s many years of failure as a policeman. The Tioga borough council had unanimously approved hiring Loehmann, and if he gets through a 90-day probationary period, he’s all set to become the town’s police chief. Pretty convenient! If he happened to shoot anyone else he could investigate and exonerate himself.
We’d like to think he might not get that far, now that meddling journalists and protesters have called attention to Loehmann’s past. But we live in an America where beloved veteran teachers get fired for reading aloud a silly children’s book full of goofy butt jokes, while America’s Worst Cops have entire professional organizations to back them up and demand they get second, third, and hundredth chances.
Mayor Wilcox said he “was not allowed to take [Loehmann’s] resume or look into his background,” which we can almost imagine being some sort of good-government rule meant to avoid favoritism, but which goes badly wrong if the council doesn’t do any real search into a job applicant’s history.
If all the council did was a cursory criminal background check, we suppose it might not have turned up anything, since despite being in the news for shooting a little boy who’d been playing with a toy gun in a snowy park, Loehmann was never charged with a crime, let alone convicted. The killing did eventually go before a grand jury, but ultimately there was no indictment against Loehmann or his partner, Frank Garmback, who drove the squad car.
Two years after killing Rice, Loehmann was fired by the Cleveland police for lying on his application by leaving out the detail that he was being dismissed from his previous copping job for a “lack of maturity” and having a bit of a meltdown during firearms training. This guy really needs a résumé workshop, ideally after he completes vocational training for some job where he’s almost never in contact with members of the public.
Loehmann also made news in 2018 when he was hired as a part-time cop in Bellaire, Ohio, but he withdrew his application after all the media scrutiny.
Mayor Wilcox says that so far, Loehmann hasn’t started work, and that, as WEWS puts it, “he won’t—until this is all cleared up,” whatever the hell that means. Wilcox has urged the borough council to hold a meeting to discuss Loehmann’s record and what to do about the new information.
Also too, true to form, WEWS reports that the Cleveland Police Patrolmen’s Association’s president, Jeff Follmer, issued a statement earnestly asking everyone to just settle down and let a cop who’s never done anything wrong do the job for which he was hired:
“Timothy Loehmann was cleared of all charges with his use of force. The only administrative charges after a civilian review was that he was found to have allegedly lied on his application. Timothy Loehmann was not given a fair chance in this area and deserves a fair chance in another city.
Well isn’t that all you need to know about America in 2022?
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