Accused Cop Killers Should Face Federal Charges: Police Chief

SARASOTA, FL — A police chief from Illinois with ties to the Tampa Bay area is on a crusade to get President Donald Trump’s administration to back a change in federal law that would revamp how cop killing cases are handled. Riverside Police Chief Thomas Weitzel’s mission to make the line-of-duty slaying of a police officer a federal offense technically began in 2011. While his pleas so far have mostly fallen “on deaf ears in Washington, D.C.,” he has no intent of backing down.

On Monday, shortly after news broke that a lone gunman killed 59 people and injured more than 500 others on the Las Vegas Strip, Weitzel picked up the phone and called the White House to “personally deliver a message that federal legislation and intervention is needed when it comes to these massive criminal violent acts and the act of killing a police officer in the performance of his or her duty,” he said.

Weitzel also sent a letter to President Trump in the days following the August slaying of two police officers in Kissimmee, Florida. (For more local news from Florida, click here to sign up for real-time news alertsand newsletters from Sarasota Patch, and click here to find your local Florida Patch. If you have an iPhone, click here to get the free Patch iPhone app.)

A 32-year veteran of the Riverside Police Department, Weitzel said he has family in the Sarasota area and keeps close tabs on what is happening in Florida. He also owns property in the area and intends to someday make it his retirement home.

In the meantime, he oversees a force of 21 officers in a town a few miles west of Chicago. With a population around 10,000, Riverside doesn’t see the volume or severity of crime its urban neighbor does, but Weitzel said the uptick in line-of-duty related homicides across the country remains troubling nonetheless.

“More and more small agencies are experiencing line-of-duty homicides (and) they’re not all being prosecuted the same,” Weitzel told Patch. “We need to make it universal throughout the United States.”

Weitzel, who has three adult sons also in law enforcement, understands what it’s like to endure a line-of-duty shooting. He was shot in the chest while out on patrol in August 1987. A bulletproof vest is credited with sparing him damage from most of the shotgun pellets, but he was still hospitalized in serious condition.

As ambushes on law enforcement officers continue to make headlines in Kissimmee and other parts of the country, Weitzel said the time for action is now.

“At least we can open the conversation,” he said. “Let’s at least look at it. Let’s talk about it.”

Weitzel’s pitch to put investigations and prosecution in the hands of federal agencies wouldn’t take local law enforcement out of the loop entirely, he said. Such crimes would be investigated “jointly, with local authorities.” Creating a uniform federal statute would help ensure solid investigations while making prosecution and penalties the same across the country, he added.

Whether federal lawmakers will agree remains to be seen. As of Monday night, Weitzel had not heard back from the White House.

By Tuesday, there had been 99 line-of-duty law enforcement deaths across the country since 2017 began, according to the Officer Down Memorial Page. That number included 35 gunfire-related deaths, two assaults and one stabbing.

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