Philadelphia Yanks 72 Police Officers Off The Street Because They Couldn’t Stop Being Racist On Facebook

Jay Connor

Maybe racist rhetoric on social media isn’t real­ly your thing, but 72 Philadelphia police offi­cers just got yanked off the street and reas­signed to admin­is­tra­tive duty because it’s appar­ent­ly theirs.

The Philadelphia Police Department has tak­en 72 offi­cers off street duty as it con­tin­ues to inves­ti­gate scores of racist or offen­sive Facebook posts alleged­ly made by city cops — the largest num­ber of offi­cers placed on desk duty at one time in recent his­to­ry, Commissioner Richard Ross said Wednesday.

During a news con­fer­ence at Police Headquarters near­ly three weeks after advo­cates pub­lished a data­base cat­a­loging the posts, Ross said that although no offi­cers had yet been dis­ci­plined, he expect­ed dozens to face inter­nal con­se­quences and at least sev­er­al to be fired. He did not iden­ti­fy any by name. 

We are equal­ly dis­gust­ed by many of the posts that you saw, and that in many cas­es the rest of the nation saw,” Ross said. After not­ing that the alleged behav­ior of his police force “makes me sick,” he added: “We are in a posi­tion to know better.”

As we report­ed ear­li­er this month, a data­base cre­at­ed by the Plain View Project revealed approx­i­mate­ly 200,000 inci­dents of alleged mis­con­duct by 85,000 police offi­cers through­out the coun­try, includ­ing their social media pro­files and behav­ior. But as cities across the nation have launched inves­ti­ga­tions into the Plain View Project’s find­ings, Philadelphia isn’t the only city unnerved by what it’s dis­cov­ered. CNN reports that St. Louis Circuit Attorney Kimberly M. Gardner pro­hib­it­ed 22 offi­cers from bring­ing their cas­es to the Circuit Attorney’s Office, refus­ing to pros­e­cute any case where these offi­cers serve as pri­ma­ry witnesses.

When a police officer’s integri­ty is com­pro­mised in this man­ner, it com­pro­mis­es the entire crim­i­nal jus­tice sys­tem and our over­all abil­i­ty to pur­sue jus­tice,” Gardner said in a state­ment. “After care­ful exam­i­na­tion of the under­ly­ing bias con­tained in those social media posts, we have con­clud­ed that this bias would like­ly influ­ence an officer’s abil­i­ty to per­form his or her duties in an unbi­ased manner.”With so many police inter­ac­tions esca­lat­ing unnec­es­sar­i­ly and con­clud­ing in vio­lence or death, hope­ful­ly, this data­base serves as a wake-up call for cities to hold their police depart­ments account­able. Because it’s clear there’s a con­nec­tion between actions and ide­olo­gies, but we didn’t need a data­base to tell us what we already knew.
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