Cleveland Police Fire Officer Who Fatally Shot 12-Year-Old Tamir Rice

Cleveland Police announced Tuesday that Timothy Loehmann, the police officer who fatally shot 12-year-old Tamir Rice, has been fired effective immediately.

“This has been tough on our entire community, and definitely on the Rice family,” Cleveland Police Chief Calvin Williams said during a news conference Tuesday.

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“When this happened in 2014, I made the comment that this is, of course, a tragedy, but it’s even more tragic that it happened at the hands of a Cleveland police officer.”

Bob Owens previously covered the “indisputable” fact that Tamir Rice was drawing his gun when he was fatally shot by Officer Loehmann:

Conservatively, Loehmann had at least three seconds to made his decision to fire. How long do officers typically have to make the life-or-decision decision to employ deadly force? Roughly 21-hundredths of a second. The average reaction time of officers is 1.5 seconds. Loehmann had plenty of time to make his decision and based on the evidence he had of an unknown hooded figure drawing a gun as his vehicle stopped mere feet away, his decision was clearly the correct one, even of the outcome turned out to be a tragedy.

The irony of this case is that Timothy Loehmann was not cut out for police work, with neither the temperament nor the maturity to be a police officer, and yet his response, in this case, was a textbook case of a lawful justified shooting.

But city officials said Loehmann’s termination had nothing to do with the Rice shooting. Instead, Loehmann was fired due to inaccuracies on his application to the Cleveland Police Department.

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Before heading to Cleveland, Loehmann had previously been hired as a police officer with Missouri’s Independence Police Department. After a six-month probationary period, IPD allowed him to resign.

His Independence supervisors deemed Loehmann’s job performance “dismal” and found that he could not “follow simple directions, could not communicate clear thoughts nor recollections,” and was “distracted” and “weepy” during firearms qualification training, according to the personnel file reviewed by Cleveland.com.

According to a disciplinary letter from the Cleveland Police Department, Loehmann allegedly lied on his application regarding how his job in Independence ended.

Loehmann had been with the Cleveland Police Department for less than a year before the 2014 shooting and was placed on desk duty as the administrative review took place.

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