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'Good day for a chokehold': the police endorsing racism and violence on Facebook
Source: The Guardian
'Good day for a chokehold': the police endorsing racism and violence on Facebook
More than 100 officers have faced official repercussions after study collected 5,000 posts from eight departments
Adam Gabbatt in New York
Tue 25 Jun 2019 06.00 BST Last modified on Tue 25 Jun 2019 06.36 BST
One post showed a photo of a dog, apparently squatting to defecate. “Hold on I got a black lives matter movement going on right now” was the accompanying text.
Another called for anti-fascist protesters to be “eliminated”. A third referred to “muslems” as “turd goat humpers”.
Those are just a few examples from a database of more than 5,000 troubling Facebook posts made by police officers across eight departments in the US – a cache of variously hateful, racist and Islamophobic public messages that has so far led to more than 100 police officers being removed from active duty or barred from bringing cases to prosecutors.
The revelations of a culture of online abusive posts by police came this month from the Plain View Project, founded by the lawyer Emily Baker-White. The Plain View Project spent 18 months examining public posts made by police officers from eight departments in the US. Baker-White’s discoveries included one officer congratulating George Zimmerman for killing the teenage Trayvon Martin, along with repeated posts encouraging violence against leftwing protesters.
The project’s work has rocked police departments from Arizona to Pennsylvania, where the Phoenix police department told the Guardian it had removed 12 officers from “enforcement assignments” while they investigate the posts.
-snip-
More than 100 officers have faced official repercussions after study collected 5,000 posts from eight departments
Adam Gabbatt in New York
Tue 25 Jun 2019 06.00 BST Last modified on Tue 25 Jun 2019 06.36 BST
One post showed a photo of a dog, apparently squatting to defecate. “Hold on I got a black lives matter movement going on right now” was the accompanying text.
Another called for anti-fascist protesters to be “eliminated”. A third referred to “muslems” as “turd goat humpers”.
Those are just a few examples from a database of more than 5,000 troubling Facebook posts made by police officers across eight departments in the US – a cache of variously hateful, racist and Islamophobic public messages that has so far led to more than 100 police officers being removed from active duty or barred from bringing cases to prosecutors.
The revelations of a culture of online abusive posts by police came this month from the Plain View Project, founded by the lawyer Emily Baker-White. The Plain View Project spent 18 months examining public posts made by police officers from eight departments in the US. Baker-White’s discoveries included one officer congratulating George Zimmerman for killing the teenage Trayvon Martin, along with repeated posts encouraging violence against leftwing protesters.
The project’s work has rocked police departments from Arizona to Pennsylvania, where the Phoenix police department told the Guardian it had removed 12 officers from “enforcement assignments” while they investigate the posts.
-snip-
Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/jun/24/police-facebook-posts-racism-violence-plain-view-project
