If recent media allegations turn out to be true, Cleveland cop Frank Woyma might not be wearing a badge and carry a gun in the City of Cleveland very much longer. The city’s Division of Police (CDP) will soon be investigating whether Woyma violated department policies by re-tweeting racist, anti-Muslim, anti-Obama, and pro-Confederate flag materials on Twitter.
This certainly would not be the first case of a cop (or another public official) being sanctioned for inappropriate and/or racist comments they made on social media. In Ferguson, MO, city officials fired a cop and the city clerk of courts over racist emails that came to light after the U.S. Department of Justice conducted a probe into the killing of Michael Brown last year. And in the 11 months since Brown’s death, cases of cops being fired for expressing racism (as well as sexism and homophobia) on social media have sprung up across the country like dandelions after a June thunderstorm.
From cities supposedly as liberal as San Francisco (where eight cops were first suspended and eventually fired for racist, sexist and homophobic text messages); to Fort Lauderdale (where four cops were fired after a racist video and a string of vile text messages were uncovered); to Baton Rouge, LA (where a 15-year veteran of that force resigned under fire after a string of bigoted text messages he wrote about blacks were released to authorities); to Edison, NJ (where a cop’s seized cell phone contained numerous racial slurs against black officers on the force); and back again down south to Miami Beach (where two high-level cops sent hundreds of racist, pornographic and crude emails to fellow cops), there seemingly are many, many cops engaging in such abhorrent, rules-busting behaviors.
CPD’s policy manual (which undoubtedly is virtually a mirror image of those in other police departments in cities around the country) has clear rules against cops posting anything on social media that “contains statements or other forms of speech that ridicule, malign, disparage, or otherwise express bias against any race, religion or protected class of individuals.”
While some, like police union officials, will downplay such incidents of racist behavior as mere harmless pranks being played by overgrown good ol’ boys (and therefore should result in nothing more than a slap-on-the-wrist suspension at best), in the cases where such conduct can be proven beyond a doubt, some folks — including police department brass in many cases — feel such transgressors should forfeit their right to be sworn officers of the law.
The undeniable fact is that when such evidenced racism is provable, this issue is much larger than the act(s) of engaging in bad behavior on social media. It literally could be a matter of life and death. A cop that harbors such racist views no doubt devalues the lives of those he targets with his remarks, and therefore it’s reasonable to assume that he would be more prone to shoot first and ask questions later when confronted in a critical situation with a member of a group he detests.
Of course cop supporters would argue that even racist cops could “compartmentalize” — in other words, leave their personal feelings and hatreds at home. But does any sane, reasonable person actually believe that racist feelings can be turned on and off like a spigot?
The world over, citizens of industrialized countries agree that members of law enforcement — due to the enormous power to kill that the state has entrusted them with — should be held to a higher standard. The question is, is expecting cops to be bias-free asking too much?
To this point, all of the cases where cops have been outed for their racist views on social media have been due to happenstance: Either someone informed their superiors of their scurrilous misuse of social media, or it was discovered during the course of an unrelated investigation.
But some are now questioning if more should be done to identify and purge police departments of racists. They’re asking: Should internal affairs units of police departments go back and look at all postings by cops, and then routinely monitor what they put out on social media in the future?
But again, there’s another side to the question. Would that constitute a witch hunt if investigators went back and checked everything a cop has posted on social media since taking their oath to protect and serve? If such department-wide investigations were carried out, the number of cops that could get “hung by the tongue” (or more accurately, by the keyboard) and thus lose their jobs, could be exceedingly high.
Still others might argue that such an investigation would accomplish nothing more than to drive racists underground, simply to make them more circumspect in their postings. But would that be necessarily a bad thing, to make cops at least appear to be unbiased?
Considering there’s a nascent movement afoot to increase the number of women and minorities on big city departments, perhaps removing those cops who have proven with their own words they are racists is one way to more swiftly accomplish this task of modernizing policing in America.
The final question has to be: What’s the upside of having a known racist wearing a badge, carrying a gun and patrolling the streets — armed and dangerous?
[Photo of 2014 Cleveland police academy graduation by Steven Gusky/Cleveland Police]
From Cool Cleveland correspondent Mansfield B. Frazier mansfieldfATgmail.com. Frazier’s From Behind The Wall: Commentary on Crime, Punishment, Race and the Underclass by a Prison Inmate is available again in hardback. Snag your copy and have it signed by the author by visiting http://NeighborhoodSolutionsInc.com.
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