Reuters photo

Having been declared grossly unfit in several earlier police jobs, Timothy Loehmann, the panicked cop who murdered Tamir Rice in 2014 for being a 12-year-old black boy playing in a park, just got hired again by a small-town Ohio police chief who felt Loehmann deserved a break, being white and all. Inexplicably, Loehmann was never charged after shooting Tamir within two seconds of arriving at the scene. He was later fired from Cleveland's Police Department not for gunning down a child, but for lying about his calamitous job history; he'd failed a 2009 police exam in Maple Heights, Ohio and been declared incurably ill-suited for police work during firearms exams in Independence, Ohio, where he had an "emotional breakdown" and "could not follow simple directions." Despite this less-than-stellar record, Bellaire Police Chief Dick Flanagan, who has his own dubious past, announced Friday he was giving a part-time job to Loehmann because he deserved "a second chance...He was never charged. It’s over and done with."

Not, said many outraged residents of Bellaire, who deemed the move “a punch in the stomach." ""Why does Timothy Loehmann deserve a 2nd chance #Bellaire Police Chief?" wrote one. "Oh, but isn't this his 3rd? No, it's his 4th. Wait, no I think it's the 5th. Meanwhile, 12yo #TamirRice got no chance." The decision prompted a letter and call-in campaign by the Tamir Rice Foundation, an editorial decrying the hire, and a bitter denunciation from Tamir's mother Samaria, who called it "devastating" and "re-traumatizing" for his family and the community, and vowed to protest it. Loehmann, she declared at a Wednesday press conference, "is unfit to be an officer, period." As surprising proof of her point, she then announced she'd just been told Loehmann was withdrawing from the job, thanking the thousands who had protested. "The world was watching," she said. "Your voices have been heard." Later, Chief Flanagan likewise cited the "uproar," "political pressure," and jammed phone lines from aggrieved citizens. The lesson here: Everything sucks, but speaking up helps.

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Tim "MAGA Trump" Loehmann on Facebook

Tamir, who didn't even get a first chance