https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/dyz7yz/cops-getting-fired-for-racist-social-media-posts

https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/dyz7yz/cops-getting-fired-for-
racist-social-media-posts

Cops Are Getting Fired Over Their Racist Social Media Posts
In the wake of George Floyd’s killing and a national uprising, police 
officers are actually facing backlash for their entries into a canon of 
bad online behavior from law enforcement.
By Katie Way
Jun 11 2020, 4:04pmShareTweetSnap

PHOTO BY GETTY VIA GETTY IMAGES

Protesters and their supporters aren’t the only ones who have gotten 
vocal on social media in the last two weeks: Across the United States, 
law enforcement officers have taken to the internet to post 
denigrating, often racist content about George Floyd and the protests 
catalyzed by his death (among too many others). And, in a reflection of 
the recent, way-overdue push for an increase in accountability, they’re 
actually getting fired for it.

On June 1, Hunter Beckwith of the Fulton, New York police department 
was fired after posting a meme on her Instagram story that stated Black 
people only care about Black lives when they are “killed by a white 
person.” According to Oswego County News Now, Fulton Police Department 
chief Craig Westbrook thanked the community for being “proactive” and 
said the post “[diminished] the trust between the police and the 
public.”

On June 3, Denver Police Department’s Tommy McClay was fired for 
posting a photo of himself alongside two other officers in bulletproof 
vests and helmets, with an on-the-nose caption to match: “Let’s start a 
riot.” The department, one of the first to use tear gas and pepper 
bullets on protesters, said the post was “inconsistent with the values 
of the Department [sic]” in a statement on Twitter.

On June 9, Troy University in Troy, Alabama fired its chief of police, 
John McCall, after alumni surfaced Facebook comments where McCall said 
Floyd “ABSOLUTELY” played a role in his killing and called protesters 
criminals while defending Donald Trump’s decision to deploy tear gas on 
a crowd in front of St. John’s Church in Washington, D.C. on June 1. 
“We are no longer confident in [McCall’s] ability to serve our 
students, faculty and staff,” university chancellor Jack Hawkins Jr. 
said in a statement posted to Facebook. “Our goal is to hear how 
University Police [sic] can best serve our campuses and ensure that 
their practices align with our values.”

Racist behavior on social media is nothing new for members of the U.S. 
police force: According to a BuzzFeed News report from 2019 on the 
Plain View Project, a database of public Facebook content posted by 
police officers in the U.S., 1 in 5 current police officers and 2 in 5 
retired police officers across the country had posted hateful material 
“displaying bias, applauding violence, scoffing at due process, or 
using dehumanizing language” on Facebook alone. While BuzzFeed News 
reported that some departments whose officers appeared in the review 
contacted the Plain View Project to learn more, it’s clear the issue 
was far from resolved. It needed a catalyst like the renewed interest 
in the Movement for Black Lives to bubble back to the surface.

Law enforcement isn’t the only industry that has seen seismic shifts in 
tolerance of racist comments and behavior. There’s CrossFit CEO Greg 
Glassman, who resigned after backlash from both a racist joke about 
George Floyd on Twitter and internal remarks about Floyd’s killing. Bon 
Appetit editor in chief Adam Rappaport resigned after writer Tammie 
Teclamariam surfaced a photo of him in brownface, which led to an 
outpouring of staff accounts of the racist environment he cultivated at 
the publication. And a handful of people in leadership positions at 
women’s digital media publications have issued apologies and made 
leadership changes as a result of Black and brown staffers sharing 
stories of discrimination via Twitter and Instagram.

All of these reckonings matter, but the one within law enforcement 
carries a different weight, as the cops being disciplined and ousted 
are revealed to be in direct violation of the famous edict to “serve 
and protect” the general public—one that they often lean on in order to 
justify their own existence.

Other law enforcement officers have faced disciplinary action for 
expressing similar racist sentiments towards protesters and police 
brutality victims online. Brooklyn court officer Terri Pinto 
Napolitano’s Facebook posts depicting the lynching of Barack Obama 
sparked calls for her termination, according to News 12. So far, she’s 
been suspended for 30 days without pay and her gun has been 
confiscated.

JJ Hoffman resigned from his position as fire chief in Lyons, Colorado 
after he received a formal reprimand for expressing his desire to “open 
up our high pressure bumper turret” and hose down protesters (a tactic 
famously deployed against civil rights activists in the 60s) on a 
Facebook thread.

An unnamed school resource officer in Woodburn, Oregon has been 
suspended for posting content the Woodburn Police Department chief 
called “troubling and disturbing” in a comment to Oregon’s KPTV.

Bert Gamin, a lieutenant with the Brevard County Sheriff’s Office in 
Florida, was suspended from his position after he claimed 
responsibility for posts from the Brevard County Fraternal Order of 
Police’s official Facebook page. The comments invited job applications 
from officers suspended for shoving 75-year-old pacifist Martin Gugino 
to the ground in Buffalo, New York; officers charged with excessive 
force in Atlanta, Georgia; and cops from the Minneapolis Police 
Department. “We are hiring in Florida,” the post read. “We got your 
back!”

Though Gamin stood by the commentary in an interview with Florida 
Today, Brevard County sheriff Wayne Ivey told the publication the 
comments were “extremely distasteful and insensitive to current 
important and critical issues that are occurring across our country.”

Research from 2018 showed that cops are more likely to brutalize 
protesters at... protests against police brutality. These events 
spiritually track with that research: members of law enforcement are 
reacting in a moment where the country reckons with the way our police 
force upholds systemic racism in a way that confirms not only that they 
are, indeed, deeply racist, but feel comfortable and safe expressing 
those views among their peers. This pattern only lends more credence to 
the idea that this institution is impossible to reform, rotten as it is 
to its core.

Follow Katie Way on Twitter.

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