A typo caused a Pa. town to mistakenly hire Tamir Rice’s killer

There’s nothing worse than a typo. One minute you’re totally coherent, and than the next minuet your bunging avery other world like a looser who drooped out of pubic school. And as that last sentence proves, spellcheck won’t save you.

Just ask the borough council of Tioga, Pa., which two weeks ago learned it had violated state statutes by hiring as the town’s sole police officer the man who killed 12-year-old Tamir Rice in 2014.

The culprit? A typo in the officer’s name.

» READ MORE: Officer who killed Tamir Rice resigns from Pa. borough police less than two days after he was sworn in

State Attorney General Josh Shapiro informed the 600-person town in north-central Pennsylvania, just a few miles from the New York state border, that it didn’t conduct the proper background check of Timothy Loehmann before hiring him. In a Facebook video of the quaint meeting where the borough council voted to hire Loehmann, his name is misspelled aloud: “L-O-C-H-M-A-N-N.” The incorrect name “Timothy Lochmann” — not “Loehmann” — was reportedly also given to local media before the officer was sworn in. Anyone who wanted to do even the simplest Googling wouldn’t have found Loehmann’s ignominious history.

Now this sleepy Pennsylvania hamlet, where the local government body meets gathered around a tiny table, has been dragged through the mud in the national press due to an accidental typo.

There’s no evidence that the town (or the officer) intended to deceive anyone when it misspelled the officer’s name. But if it did, it wouldn’t be the first time that a typo was used not just intentionally, but strategically.

The Jan. 6 Committee has reminded Americans about the onslaught of lawsuits that Donald Trump’s legal team and allies filed in the weeks after the 2020 election. But we’ve largely forgotten how typo-ridden those hastily slapped-together lawsuits were. One attorney, Sidney Powell, misspelled the word district three different ways on the very first page of two different lawsuits — districct, distrcoict, and distrct — prompting some on the right to suggest the typos were intentional in order to garner more media attention. Given the decibel level of those postelection days, the suggestion doesn’t seem far-fetched.

» READ MORE: Pennsylvania town broke the law by hiring police officer who killed Black 12-year-old, AG Shapiro says

A few weeks earlier, the New York Times ran an in-depth examination of so-called typosquatting, a method of inserting intentional typos to circumvent traditional social media efforts to filter out disinformation. The hashtag #BidenCrimeFamily was used for more than a year by conservatives hoping to impugn the future president, but once Twitter’s algorithms started weighing down false stories that featured that hashtag, Trump found a back door: A few days before the election he tweeted #BidenCrimeFamiily — with a doubled ii to evade the algorithm. The typo-laden #BidenCrimeFamiily went viral itself, allowing disinformation to spread faster than Twitter could tamp it down in the crucial last days before the election.

It’s a remarkably low-tech way to stump some of the savviest computer programmers on the planet, and a strategy like this doesn’t have to be cooked up in a shadowy corporate boardroom, or even in the White House communications office. In fact, the fluorescent-lit, rec-basement-looking crowded room where the Tioga borough council unanimously approved Timothy Loehmann’s hiring looks like exactly the kind of place where such a strategy could be borne.

Or should that be born?

Eh, it’s just one letter. What’s the worst that could happen?

The Grammarian, otherwise known as Jeffrey Barg, looks at how language, grammar, and punctuation shape our world, and appears biweekly. Send comments, questions, and pseudo-words to jeff@theangrygrammarian.com.