The Minneapolis Police Department terminated Officer Joseph Klimmek, an 18-year veteran of the force, after an internal investigation concluded he liked a Facebook comment that referenced lynching in response to a post about a Black suspect accused of fatally shooting a police officer. Klimmek's last day on the job was February 21, 2026.
The case raises a question Minneapolis leadership apparently never paused to consider: Should a single click on a social media post end a law enforcement career?
The facts, drawn from MPD's own Internal Affairs report, tell a story that is more complicated than the department's swift judgment suggests. And the department's eagerness to make an example of Klimmek stands in sharp contrast to its well-documented struggles with officer retention, morale, and public safety in a city still reeling from years of anti-police politics.
On March 17, 2024, a member of the private Facebook group "Minneapolis Police Officers and Civilian Employees, Current and Retired" shared a post about a suspect accused of fatally shooting a police officer. The post included news articles showing the suspect was a Black man. Another user, whose identity has not been disclosed, commented: "Get a rope and find a tree."
Klimmek liked both the original post and the comment.
Group members took screenshots and turned them over to MPD Internal Affairs. An investigation followed. Klimmek sat for an interview with investigators and admitted to liking the comment, as FOX 9 reported. He told investigators he had done so in support of the death penalty for anyone who murders a police officer.
"I was probably supportive of that post... the death penalty for someone who murdered a police officer."
When pressed on the racial connotations of the phrase "get a rope and find a tree," Klimmek offered a response that investigators clearly found unsatisfying.
"I guess anyone can correlate anything to whatever they want."
Former Minneapolis Police Chief Brian O'Hara signed the conclusion of the Internal Affairs report. His assessment was blunt: Klimmek "did not express any remorse for his actions." O'Hara added: "The public cannot trust his judgment, and I cannot trust his judgment."
That was the end of Klimmek's career.
Klimmek was not a spotless officer. MPD's discipline decision dashboard shows three prior suspensions over his tenure, and they paint a mixed portrait, part poor judgment, part the kind of incidents that accumulate over a long career in a high-pressure department.
In 2017, Klimmek and another officer watched a security guard punch a handcuffed suspect and failed to intervene. He received a 40-hour suspension. In 2021, he crashed a squad vehicle into a civilian car that had the right of way. That earned a 20-hour suspension.
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 then taken into custody and questioned by detectives. Another 40-hour suspension followed.
None of these prior incidents involved racial bias or social media misconduct. The department dealt with each through suspension and returned Klimmek to duty. The Facebook "like" was different, not because it caused harm to a member of the public, but because it created a public relations liability.
Set aside, for a moment, whether Klimmek's explanation was credible. Maybe it was. Maybe it wasn't. The phrase "get a rope and find a tree" carries an obvious historical weight, and Klimmek's claim that he was unaware of its racial connotations strains belief. His dismissive response to investigators did him no favors.
But the department's own handling of the case raises harder questions than the ones it chose to answer.
Klimmek received social media policy training in 2015, nine years before the incident. The Internal Affairs report notes this fact without exploring whether the training was adequate, updated, or reinforced at any point in the intervening decade. Did the department make clear that a single "like" on a private group post could be a fireable offense? The record, as disclosed, does not say.
The person who actually wrote the comment, "Get a rope and find a tree", has not been publicly identified. It is unclear from available reporting whether that individual faced any investigation or consequence. If the comment itself was the problem, the silence around its author is notable.
And then there is the timeline. The Facebook post was made on March 17, 2024. Klimmek's termination did not take effect until February 21, 2026, nearly two years later. What happened during that gap? The Internal Affairs investigation and interview occurred at some point in between, but the exact dates remain undisclosed. A department that treated this as a clear-cut case of lost trust took a remarkably long time to reach its conclusion.
Minneapolis has spent the years since 2020 hemorrhaging officers. The city's political leadership spent months entertaining proposals to dismantle the police department entirely. Officers left in droves. Crime surged. Residents in the city's most vulnerable neighborhoods bore the consequences.
Against that backdrop, the department chose to fire an 18-year veteran, not for excessive force, not for corruption, not for a criminal act, but for clicking a button on Facebook. Klimmek joined MPD on February 4, 2008, and served through some of the most turbulent years in the department's history.
The ACLU, for its part, has separately flagged that MPD may still have excessive force issues, a concern that has nothing to do with Facebook likes and everything to do with the kind of on-the-ground policing problems that terminating veteran officers does not solve.
Chief O'Hara, now described as "former" chief, though the timing of his own departure relative to the report is unclear, declared that the public could not trust Klimmek's judgment. Fair enough. But the public might also wonder about the judgment of a department that takes two years to act on a screenshot, fires a veteran over a click, and still cannot explain whether anyone else in that Facebook group faced scrutiny.
Several questions hang over this case. Was Klimmek the only officer who liked the comment, or were others investigated? Did Klimmek appeal his termination? What specific policy did the department cite as the basis for firing rather than suspending him, given that far more consequential misconduct, watching a handcuffed suspect get punched, missing a loaded weapon on a suspect, had previously resulted only in suspensions?
The identity of the police officer who was fatally shot, the identity of the suspect, and the details of that underlying case are absent from the reporting. So is any indication of whether the 2024 handgun incident involved the same suspect referenced in the Facebook post or was entirely separate.
These are not trivial gaps. They go to the heart of whether Klimmek was fired for genuine misconduct or for becoming a convenient symbol in a department desperate to prove it takes racial sensitivity seriously, regardless of the cost to its own ranks.
No serious person defends the language in that Facebook comment. But there is a difference between writing a comment that invokes lynching and clicking "like" on a post in a private group for current and retired officers. The department treated them as the same thing.
Klimmek's explanation, that he supported the death penalty for cop killers, not racial violence, may have been incomplete or evasive. But the department's own report does not allege that Klimmek had a history of racial bias, used racial slurs, or engaged in discriminatory policing. The entire case rests on a single click and an interview in which the officer failed to grovel convincingly enough.
Minneapolis has spent years demanding accountability from its police force. That is a reasonable demand. But accountability that fires a veteran officer for a Facebook reaction while the city's leadership class escapes scrutiny for policies that left neighborhoods less safe is not accountability. It is theater.
When a department measures its moral seriousness by how fast it can end a career over a social media click, the institution has confused public relations with public safety. Minneapolis residents deserve both. They are getting neither.
