OMG, this is unbelievable…except that it totally isn’t. After all, this is Cobb County, Georgia…where racism is just good ol’ Southern heritage and tradition at work. And even the cops affirm it, however inadvertently this one let the (open) secret slip:
Cobb County police Chief Mike Register told Channel 2 Investigative Reporter Mark Winne that after Channel 2 Action News submitted an open-records request, he and his command staff looked at the video.
“Remember, we only kill black people. We only kill black people, right?” the Cobb County police officer can be heard saying on the video.
On Friday, they opened an internal investigation.
Register said the officer heard on video is Lt. Greg Abbott. Register said Abbott has been assigned to administrative duties pending the outcome of the investigation.
According to Register, the recording is part of a DUI stop. The woman said she was hesitant to put her hands down to pick up a cellphone because she didn’t want to get shot.
“No matter what context it was said, it shouldn’t have been said,” Register said.
Suri Chadha Jimenez, who is representing the driver in the case, said he believes the officer was being sarcastic after the woman “gave him some lip.”
“It makes you cringe when you hear it. It’s unacceptable,” Jimenez said.
Cringe? Yeah, I would hope to shout that it does.
But this line is more than merely cringeworthy. Even uttered sarcastically, it’s still the unacceptable truth that police in Georgia (and, let’s be real, practically everywhere that blacks are a minority, including beautiful liberal multicultural Toronto) really are that fucking racist. They’ll stop black people more. They’ll demand to see black people’s IDs more. They’ll frisk black people more. They’ll break down black people’s doors more. They’ll plant drugs on them more. And when it comes to the trigger-happy confrontational ones, they’ll shoot (and kill) black people more.
‘Course, Georgia being Georgia, with its long history of slavery, the Confederacy, Jim Crow, the KKK, resistance to non-white voter registration and school integration and yadda yadda yadda oh just read some fucking history already, it stands to reason that this cop wasn’t really kidding when he said that they only shoot (and kill) black people. Police in the US south are the direct descendants of slave patrols, and busting uppity niggruhs is what they were originally and traditionally expected to do. The South may have lost the Civil War, and been dragged through Emancipation kicking and screaming (or at least its wealthy planters were), but the one thing that hasn’t changed in all this time is the color of the people who felt the lash of the law the hardest.
White thugs? They get a free pass for a lot of things, especially in the US south. And if the cops MUST bust them, they’ll handcuff and frog-march them as gently as they can. They won’t rough ’em up unless maybe they’re on drugs or acting agitated. Dylann Roof was only an anomaly in that the police were actually willing to arrest him. They didn’t, however, maltreat him as they routinely do black arrestees; they actually stopped for fast food along the way because the little snowflake was hungry.
And when the white thug also happens to be a cop? Well, you get scenes like the above, in which a cop tries to “reassure” a white woman he’s stopped by pointing out that she’s in no physical danger. By telling her that he’d only shoot her if she were black.
I don’t know about you, but I’m white. And I wouldn’t feel the least bit reassured to know that the color of my skin, or rather lack thereof, is all that’s standing between me and a police bullet.
PS: Oh looky, the fine 28-year veteran has just pulled a “you can’t fire me, I quit!” Typical.
