'Good Day for a Chokehold': The Police Endorsing Racism and Violence on Facebook

By Adam Gabbatt, Guardian UK

25 June 19

More than 100 officers have faced official repercussions after study collected 5,000 posts from eight departments

ne 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.

Posts by Phoenix officers included one claiming: “It’s a good day for a chokehold”, while an officer posted a photo of someone in police uniform, fist drawn back mid-punch, along with the words: “I’m going to protect and serve the shit out of you.”

On 14 July 2013, one day after Zimmerman was acquitted of the murder of Trayvon – a black 17-year-old who was unarmed – one officer wrote: “Congratulations George Zimmerman!!!! Thank you for cleaning up our community one thug at a time.”

Last week, Philadelphia police placed 72 officers on desk duty as a result of the Plain View Project’s findings – the city’s police commissioner said he expected several to be fired – while in St Louis, the circuit attorney has barred 22 police officers from bringing her cases. The police department of Denison, Florida, has fired one officer and disciplined another.

Some of the posts identified by the Plain View Project, which created a searchable database with screengrabs of offending content, included posts making light of police violence, others encouraging vigilantism, and a surprising number endorsing people driving cars into crowds of protesters.

“I was surprised and disappointed by the posts,” Baker-White said.

“[Officers were] talking about what they would like to do to someone accused of killing a cop or accused of some heinous crime. Also troubling was a number of posts where officers appeared to joke about lying on the stand, especially about police brutality.”

The Plain View Project obtained staff lists from eight police departments, in Phoenix; Dallas; Philadelphia; St Louis; York, Pennsylvania; Denison, Texas; Twin Falls, Idaho; and Lake County, Florida. The team then searched for individual officers’ Facebook profiles, and examined all their public postings, considering “whether these posts or comments could undermine public trust and confidence in police”.

“When I look at those posts I don’t see them as individual posts at this point,” Baker-White said. “I see them in the aggregate as a body of statements and they seem like they’re part of a larger narrative that exists in American policing, one that at times encourages violence or endorses vigilantism and discriminates against minority communities.”

One of the swiftest responses to the Plain View Project findings came last week in St Louis, where the circuit attorney, Kimberly Gardner, permanently barred seven officers identified by the project from bringing her cases to prosecute and barred a further 15 temporarily.

It was a St Louis officer who posted the photo of the dog, and the same man went on to write: “F these muslem [sic] turd goat humpers” above an article discussing alleged violence by a Muslim man against police. Other officers published posts criticizing Islam and Black Lives Matter – including one that compared the movement to the Ku Klux Klan – and several posted photos of the Confederate flag.

“Nobody wants to see police officers saying the things that were said there. The community has the expectation that police officers treat everybody with fairness and dignity,” said Susan Ryan, a spokeswoman for the circuit attorney.

“So it’s terribly disheartening and it doesn’t bring anybody any pleasure to read that.”

In a statement, the St Louis Metropolitan police department said it had initiated an investigation “immediately following the publishing of The Plain View Project’s report”. A spokesman said the department would not comment until the investigation was complete.

The 72 officers taken off the streets in Philadelphia represent the largest number of police removed from active duty in recent history, according to the Philadelphia Inquirer. The Plain View Project identified 1,270 troubling posts made by 330 Philadelphia officers, and a further 2,000 posts from former officers.

“Here’s your Maranda [sic] rights,” wrote one Philadelphia officer in a post from 2015. “1. You have the right to shit [sic] the fuck up…..anything you say will cause me to fucking throat punch you.”

The post continued by suggesting if the person being arrested could not afford an attorney it was their “fucking fault”. Philadelphia police declined to comment beyond Ross’s remarks.

One person identified as a detective with the Philadelphia police linked to a Breitbart article about “alt-left antifa extremists”. “If they show up at any cops [sic] house they should be eliminated,” the detective wrote.

Responding to the Plain View Project report in a press conference, the city’s police commissioner, Richard Ross, said the scale of the posts “defies logic” and “makes me sick”.

“We are equally disgusted by many of the posts that you saw, and that in many cases the rest of the nation saw,” the Inquirer reported Ross as saying.

“We are in a position to know better.”

With more than 100 officers either under investigation or being stripped of duties, the results of the Plain View Project’s work will continue to have ramifications for the eight police departments it investigated. Baker-White said that, for now, there were no plans to explore other departments – but she could not help but wonder about the scale of the problem.

“They’re just a snapshot from a few police departments,” she said of the posts Plain View identified.

“They’re only comments that were posted publicly and they’re only posts from officers that we were able to find and verify were officers.

“I can’t help but wonder how much more of this content exists both publicly in jurisdictions we didn’t look at, and privately – shared with only friends or in private groups – in the jurisdictions that we did.”