You know there was a time a couple years ago when I spent a lot of time writing about cops randomly killing black people for sport and how sometimes it’s a good idea to burn your own city to the ground in order to get attention. Eventually the #BlackLivesMatter movement started and that’s kinda great. And then last year I ended up writing about Alton Sterling being gunned down in a parking lot and WHILE I was writing it, Philando Castile was killed live on streaming Facebook video in front of his girlfriend and child. I ended up switching to writing about that in the middle of the blog post and after that I was just kind of done with it for a while. It’s NOT that I didn’t care. I do…. a lot! But the Castile video affected me deeply and I just didn’t have much to say to address it for a while. It was kind of painful and I had done it so much that really, what more was there fore me to say. Instead I devoted my time to reviewing movies about dick jokes and complaining about admitted sex offenders becoming leader of the free world. You know… fun stuff.
Anyway, today I got a news blip on my watch that excited me. The Cleveland Police department has fired Timothy Loehmann, the officer who jumped from a a still moving vehicle just to shoot 12-year-old Tamir Rice at point blank range.
Yay!!! Justice! I was totally excited for about three and a half seconds. And then I thought… Wait a minute… let me read the article…
Yep… Loehmann has been fired. But not for shooting Rice. He was fired because they’ve discovered that he lied on his job application. He was previously a cop in another jurisdiction but was fired when they decided that he was “unfit to be a policeman”, specifically because he had bad gun safety skills of which his previous Chief said “I do not believe time, nor training, will be able to change or correct the deficiencies.”
Yep… That happened….
So the moral of the story is “shooting a 12yo kid in cold blood is all good just don’t lie about a job reference because we’re too lazy to check on them ahead of time.”
#BlackLivesMatter… you know… a little…
I was so pissed when I heard the why today