Hiring of officer who killed Tamir Rice should have never happened

The former Cleveland police officer who shot and killed 12-year-old Tamir Rice in 2014 withdrew from the police force of a small Pennsylvania town on Thursday after community backlash over his hiring.

Timothy Loehmann was sworn in earlier in the week as the lone police officer in Tioga — a community of about 600 people in rural north-central Pennsylvania, nearly 300 miles from Cleveland.

Loehmann resigned after media scrutiny and community backlash including condemnation from Tamir’s family.

“While it’s all well and good that Loehmann will not be inflicting a reign of terror with a badge and a gun upon Tioga Borough residents and visitors, borough officials must be held accountable for their demonstrably, atrociously poor judgment and ineptitude,” Subodh Chandra, one of the attorneys who represented the family in their civil suit, said in a written statement Thursday.

“This game of whack-a-mole with Loehmann shamelessly and repeatedly resurfacing as a cop elsewhere needs to end,” he said.

Samaria Rice, Tamir’s mother, told cleveland.com that Tioga’s decision to hire Loehmann was a “big mistake.”

“He shouldn’t be a police officer anywhere in the United States,” she said.

Tamir Rice, who was Black, was playing with a pellet gun outside a recreation center in Cleveland on Nov. 22, 2014, when he was shot and killed by Loehmann seconds after Loehmann and his partner arrived.

The shooting sparked community protests about police treatment of Black people, especially after a grand jury decided not to indict the white officer or his partner.

It is an outrage that officers like Loehmann are rarely charged with crimes in civilian deaths, and it’s even rarer for them to be convicted.

Loehmann is unfit to be a police officer.

Cleveland settled a lawsuit over Tamir’s death for $6 million, and the city ultimately fired Loehmann for having lied on his application to become a police officer.

Loehmann had failed to disclose to the Cleveland police department why he resigned from a previous role at a police department in Independence, Ohio, reports the New York Times.

“Supervisors there had recommended his termination, specifying ‘an inability to emotionally function,’ in addition to citing examples of lying and insubordination,” the Times reported.

Municipalities must be held accountable for conducting thorough background checks in hiring so that they do not hire bad police officers. Loehmann’s hiring in Tioga is not unique. He is just the latest example of a police officer getting rehired after being fired elsewhere.

Many police officers are reinstated to their positions after being fired.

A 2017 Washington Post report found that although the nation’s largest police departments have fired at least 1,881 officers for misconduct that betrayed the public’s trust during a period of more than a decade, departments were forced to reinstate more than 450 officers after appeals required by union contracts.

Police unions and police contracts are one of the main obstacles to police reforms because they protect bad officers and prevent them from being held accountable.

Police union contracts need to be changed so that police chiefs can remove bad officers from the force permanently. Also, federal law needs to be changed to ensure that police officers can be held accountable in court for actions violating the civil rights of Americans.