Cleveland Officer Who Killed Tamir Rice Is Hired by an Ohio Police Department

But in Bellaire and Beyond, the Police Department was quickly criticized for employing the officer, whose actions in November 2014 set off national protests over the use of force by white law enforcement officers against unarmed African-Americans.

Owens L. Brown, president of the N.A.A.C.P. chapter in Wheeling, W. Va., across the river from Bellaire, said he was not surprised that a police department would hire Loehmann. (Bellaire does not have its own N.A.A.C.P. chapter, Mr. Brown said.) More than 93 percent of the people who live in the metropolitan area that includes Wheeling and Bellaire are white, according to the census.

"It's a travesty that they are willing to hire this person and it's a lack of caring," Mr. Brown said on Monday. "It may be for the race for some of the attitudes here from the police."

A camera that captured Tamir's death showed that Officer Loehmann stepped out of the passenger side of a patrol car and within seconds opened fire on Tamir, who was playing with a pellet gun, at a park. Officer Loehmann, who was responding to a question about a guy in a pistol.

The officer who was driving the car, Frank Garmback, was suspended for five days.

The 911 operator who took the call was also convinced that Tamir was "probably a juvenile" and that the weapon was "probably fake."

The shooting came in a string of high-profile killings of black people by the police, including Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo., in 2014, and Alton Sterling in Baton Rouge, La., In 2016. , either.

Beyond the killing of Tamir, there have been general questions about Officer Loehmann's fitness to be a police officer. He joined the Cleveland Police Department after he had resigned from another Ohio police department, which noted in his personal report that he showed a "dangerous loss of composure" during firearms training.

On Friday, Chief Flanagan announced that he was also hired another part-time officer: Eric Smith, who was suspended in April 1939 in Bethesda, Ohio, and was under investigation by the Ohio Attorney General's Office for alleged misuse of a state criminal justice database.