PHILADELPHIA (KYW Newsradio) — The police officer who killed 12-year-old Tamir Rice in Cleveland, Ohio, 2014, was recently hired by a small town in Pennsylvania. Following a public outcry, the officer resigned before ever serving a shift — but a Pennsylvania law should have prevented the hire in the first place.
About two years ago, after Minneapolis police killed George Floyd, Democratic State Rep. Chris Rabb sponsored and helped pass Act 57, a law conceived as a way to make sure bad officers were not rehired. It created a database of police misconduct, collecting employment termination records for everyone looking for a job in any Pennsylvania law enforcement agency, Rabb says.
“Any law enforcement employer is supposed to do a mandatory background investigation, tapping into that confidential database, before offering employment to that applicant,” Rabb said.
Rabb says it’s a step in the right direction, but it still leaves much to be desired: “Out-of-state law enforcement agencies are not required to provide documentation for folks applying for jobs in Pennsylvania.”
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In November 2014, Rice, who is Black, was seen with a toy gun at a Cleveland playground when officer Timothy Loehmann, who is white, fatally shot him. This was three months after police in Ferguson, Missouri, killed 18-year-old Michael Brown. Rice’s death sparked nationwide protests of law enforcement officers’ excessive use of deadly force against Black people.
The Cleveland Police Department fired Loehmann — for failing to tell them that a previous employer had found him to lack the emotional stability necessary to be a police officer. Loehmann was eventually able to get hired as the sole police officer in Tioga, a small borough of about 700 people, near the New York border, about 230 miles northwest of Philadelphia.
Rabb and Attorney General Josh Shapiro say, although Tioga might have been unable to get adequate information from other law enforcement agencies when they hired Loehmann, they still failed to follow Act 57.
“They were supposed to do a background check, and they didn’t,” Rab said. “So they flagrantly violated that law.”
Rabb says there is currently no enforceable penalty for not doing a background check as the law requires, and it would take further action by state lawmakers or regulators to change that.
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Legal scholar Raff Donelson, formerly of Pennsylvania State University, who followed the case closely, says a national database would help minimize mistakes like Tioga’s. But he says he is not optimistic about that happening anytime soon.
“We would need an actual act of Congress to accomplish an actual comprehensive database of police misconduct,” he said.
“I don’t think we’re very close at all … because no one has offered any such thing.”
Two days after Loehmann was sworn in, and before working a single shift, he resigned from Tioga. Four borough councilmembers also resigned over their roles in the hiring.
Calls to Tioga Borough for comment on this story were not immediately returned.