The Minneapolis Police Department fired an 18-year veteran officer after an internal investigation found he "liked" a Facebook comment calling for a suspect, a Black man accused of fatally shooting a police officer, to be lynched. Officer Joseph Klimmek's last day on the force was February 21, 2026, closing out a career already marked by multiple suspensions.
The case, first reported by FOX 9, centers on a March 17, 2024, post in a private Facebook group called "Minneapolis Police Officers and Civilian Employees, Current and Retired." The post focused on a suspect accused of killing a police officer and included news articles showing the suspect was a Black man. An unnamed user commented beneath it: "Get a rope and find a tree."
Klimmek liked both the original post and that comment. Other members of the Facebook group took screenshots and turned them over to MPD Internal Affairs.
Internal Affairs investigators interviewed Klimmek about the activity. He admitted to liking the comment but offered a specific explanation. As quoted in the Internal Affairs report:
"I was probably supportive of that post... the death penalty for someone who murdered a police officer."
When investigators pressed him on the racial connotations of the phrase, "get a rope and find a tree" carries an unmistakable historical association with the lynching of Black Americans, Klimmek was dismissive. His response, again from the report:
"I guess anyone can correlate anything to whatever they want."
That answer did not satisfy the department. Former Minneapolis Police Chief Brian O'Hara signed the conclusion of the Internal Affairs report, writing that Klimmek "did not express any remorse for his actions." O'Hara's judgment was blunt:
"The public cannot trust his judgment, and I cannot trust his judgment."
Klimmek had received social media policy training from MPD back in 2015, nine years before the Facebook incident.
The termination did not arrive in a vacuum. MPD's publicly maintained discipline decision dashboard shows Klimmek had already been suspended three separate times during his career, which began on February 4, 2008.
In 2017, Klimmek and another MPD officer watched a security guard punch a handcuffed suspect and did nothing. He drew a 40-hour suspension. In 2021, he crashed a Minneapolis squad vehicle into a civilian car that had the right of way, earning a 20-hour suspension.
Then in 2024, the same year as the Facebook incident, Klimmek failed to find a loaded handgun with a 30-round magazine on a suspect who was subsequently taken into custody and questioned by detectives. That lapse cost him another 40-hour suspension. The pattern matters. A department willing to retain an officer through three suspensions ultimately drew the line at a social media post.
The case raises fair questions about proportionality and process. Liking a Facebook comment is not the same as writing one. Klimmek's stated reason, support for the death penalty when a police officer is murdered, is a sentiment shared by millions of Americans who would never phrase it as "get a rope and find a tree." Whether the like reflected racial animus or a careless click on a post about a cop-killer, the department decided the distinction did not matter enough to save his job.
The firing lands in a department already under intense scrutiny. Former Chief O'Hara, who signed the report concluding Klimmek should go, is himself no longer leading the force. He resigned after allegations that he tampered with a sexual misconduct investigation, a departure that underscored how deep the accountability problems run inside MPD.
The circumstances of O'Hara's exit were serious enough that Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey publicly confirmed the chief was forced out over the misconduct probe tampering. That means the official who judged Klimmek unfit to serve was himself pushed from office under a cloud of his own.
None of that excuses what Klimmek did. But it does illustrate a department where leadership failures and rank-and-file misconduct feed each other in a cycle that erodes public trust from every direction.
Minneapolis is hardly alone. Across the country, police departments have faced reckoning over internal conduct failures. In Washington, D.C., police officials were fired over crime statistic manipulation after months of federal scrutiny, a reminder that the integrity problems plaguing law enforcement are not confined to one city or one kind of misconduct.
Several questions remain open. The Internal Affairs report does not identify the suspect accused of fatally shooting a police officer, nor does it name the slain officer or specify when that shooting occurred. It is unclear whether Klimmek has appealed or contested his termination.
The specific MPD social media policy Klimmek was found to have violated has not been publicly detailed beyond the reference to his 2015 training. And the unnamed Facebook user who actually wrote "Get a rope and find a tree", the person who composed the words rather than merely clicking a thumbs-up, does not appear to have faced any public consequence, at least not in the available record.
High-profile law enforcement scandals have become distressingly routine. In Atlanta, a deputy police chief was identified in a federal judge's courthouse sex scandal, yet another case where the officers entrusted with enforcing standards proved unable to meet them.
The ACLU, referenced in FOX 9's coverage, has separately raised concerns that MPD may still have excessive force issues, a broader institutional critique that sits alongside the Klimmek case without directly intersecting it.
For conservative readers who back the police and believe officers deserve the benefit of the doubt, the Klimmek case is uncomfortable in a specific way. The instinct to defend a cop who says he simply supports capital punishment for cop-killers runs headlong into the plain text of what he endorsed. "Get a rope and find a tree" is not a policy argument. It is not a call for due process. It is a phrase with one historical meaning, directed at a Black suspect.
An officer who cannot see that, or who sees it and clicks "like" anyway, is an officer who hands ammunition to every activist looking to paint all cops as bigots. That harms the vast majority of officers who serve honorably and who already operate under relentless political pressure from the left.
Klimmek served 18 years. He had training on exactly this kind of conduct. He chose to engage anyway, then told investigators that people can "correlate anything to whatever they want." The department correlated it to a firing. Given the record, that is hard to second-guess.
When defenders of law enforcement demand accountability from prosecutors, judges, and politicians, they cannot flinch when the same standard reaches one of their own.
