Alabama Town Disbands Police Force After Racist Text Message Surfaces
from the racists-in-Alabama???-oh-my-word dept
Were you ever so terrible at your job that your entire place of employment was put out of business?
Let’s just say, for the sake of argument, that none of you are that inept or unprofessional. But it only takes one bad apple to result in the tossing of the whole bunch, provided that the barrel of law enforcement apples is small enough.
Vincent, Alabama (until recently) was home to a small police force. One officer, who has yet to be named, sent out a text message pretty much everyone (including the overseers of the town of 2,000) found to be racist.
AL.com published a screenshot of the text.
If you can’t read/see the image, here’s a direct quote of the text exchange between Vincent police officers:
What do y’all call a pregnant slave?
?
??
BOGO
Buy one, get one free.
Simplistic. Stupid. Unfunny. And not all that unexpected. Police work is biased. Law enforcement agencies don’t seem to have a problem keeping racists employed.
The bare minimum of accountability was performed by the head of the police department.
“Appropriate disciplinary action has been taken” against a Vincent police officer who sent a text message containing a racist joke, said Police Chief James Srygley.
LOL NO, said Vincent city officials. This is bad. And this is worse than something that can be handled by nothing more than a statement claiming some sort of discipline has been deployed by the police chief.
Nope. Something more drastic needed to be done. And kudos to Vincent officials for doing it. The Vincent Police Department is no longer, as The Guardian reports. The small scale scandal managed to ensnare two-thirds of the police department. One of those apparently involved in the text message exchange was Chief Srygley.
[O]n Thursday, Srygley himself was identified as one of the officers who was terminated.
It appears Chief Srygley was not speaking about himself in his original statement. Another officer, the assistant police chief, was also terminated. All that was left was a single, now-unsupervised officer.
It was at that point, city leaders decided to pull the trigger. It voted to disband the department.
Good call. Even in a three-person department, leaders need to be leaders. And even if this seems far less racist than other incidents involving officers in larger departments, the fact is it apparently involved the small department’s two most senior officers.
Ignoring this in favor of keeping a small PD intact would have sent the message that officers are free to act reprehensibly provided they work for agencies that can’t afford to lose them. But calling the whole thing off sends the opposite — and far more correct — message: no one, no matter how essential to day-to-day government business is exempt from accountability.
Filed Under: alabama, police, racism, text messages, vincent
Comments on “Alabama Town Disbands Police Force After Racist Text Message Surfaces”
God damn racists are stupid.
Re:
Modern racism isn’t the old caste system of yore, with it’s roots in obtaining the cheap labor needed to produce low-margin goods in economies of scale.
Today’s racist is a frustrated person who cannot understand why s/he doesn’t have the life they want and feel disempowered by the changing world around them. They cast about for something, anything, to make them feel even the tiniest smidge of powerful and superior. The feelings are petty and childish, so the actions are petty and childish.
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Like, it’s a racist version of the first scene in the King of the Hill pilot.
“You know what they say Ford stands for, don’tcha? It stands for Fix It Again, Tony. Heh heh.”
A better response than larger cities have managed
The department small as it was was disbanded and not a thing of value was lost.
For one of them to make a ‘joke’ that heinous it was pretty clear they had no business being given any sort of power and the fact that the department head merely responded with a vague ‘appropriate disciplinary action was taken’ sends a pretty strong message of doing the bare minimum to brush it under the rug so good on the city for realizing the department needed to be sacked and following through on it.
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To be honest, such a radical response would be difficult in a large city.
But certainly, strong action is needed. Maybe not disbanding entire police departments, but firing any chief that doesn’t take strong action against racism, abuse of authority, excessive use of force…
Way too often, police doesn’t have a “bad apple” problem, despite all their whining. They have a “spoiled barrel” problem after years of removing “good apples” to spare the feelings of the bad ones.
Re: I agree.
I can’t imagine anything similar happen where I live in New York City because if such a thing were to be exposed (and I can guarantee over 9000% that cops here either feel this way or protect those who do), they would be backed by the various police unions. It’s bad enough that we have a cop as a mayor; I’m really happy that this AL town did the right thing because I can’t imagine for a second something like this happening here. Hell, I don’t think John Lennon could have imagined it happening here!
Re: Re:
Imagine future phone tech
Racist SMS
Ah
Re: Re: The way around unions...
You don’t fire the offenders, you reorganize their departments so that their positions become redundant, and then you trim the excess positions.
Honestly, if corporations can manage this simple maneuver, I see no reason why municipalities can’t do the same thing.
Re: Re: Re:
Two words: Police unions.
Re: Re: Re:
You don’t fire the offenders, you reorganize their departments so that their positions become redundant, and then you trim the excess positions.
Well, yes…but police unions are nothing like a labor union.
Try this on for size; there are states whose deal with the union renders the city completely powerless visavi the police. They have the nuclear option – reducing the budget – but even that is of limited value since civil forfeiture laws mean the police can fund themselves through what is essentially highway robbery.
It should come as no surprise that a branch of government which has managed to get SCOTUS to give them qualified immunity and an outright disavowal of their actual job role – “To Serve And Protect” – is similarly protected from job redundancy reorganizations.
I guess he needed a better punchline?
I’ll see myself out
Calling davec and Koby, cleanup of policemen hurt fee-fees in Aisle 5.
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Is this shit strictly necessary?
Re: Re:
Do you think it’s not necessary to call out bigots?
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Obviously.
Um…it’s a subpar joke, and the sense of humor in it is something I’d expect from a high-fantasy orc, but where’s the racism? I’m having trouble seeing it.
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Because the only slaves in the US were black slaves, I guess. In the UK, it wouldn’t have been a problem because although we have our own history of having enslaved native Africans, our own ancestors were enslaved by the Romans, so the history of slavery here hits both sides of that particular debate.
Re: Re:
black people weren’t the only enslaved people in the US
but they were the majority of slaves
Re: Re: Re:
Correct. Majority. Mostly east and south east. I’ve seen numbers guessed between 55% and 80%.
But also native Americans and, in the far west, Asians, mostly Chinese.
And there WERE white slaves as well.
All of that is just slaves.
Then we had indentured service. Where racial percentages are inverted and there was nothing any more kind in indentureship over slavery. You literally become property there too.
It’s a very sad point in our history all around.
Sad
For the size, it’s cheaper to contract with the county sheriff for police services than paying full time with benefits. While they could have just hired new officers, they probably realized it was cheaper.
They refunded the police because they saw the ones they had were defective.
Disgusting
It’s a wonder this sort of mindset still exists, let alone among POLICE OFFICERS.
Re: Sadly
It not only still exists, but there are those who not only think this way, but believe themselves to be vastly morally superior to decent people and in the overwhelming majority (mostly because they live in racist bubble chambers, but both online and offline).
“All that was left was a single, now-unsupervised officer.”
This sounds like the start of a feel-good comedy about a young deputy who singlehandedly saves his town after the rest of the force got fired for being racist.
What concerns me here is this… what happens next?
If you look at the LinkedIn profiles of those two officers, where do they land next? What does the town do next for policing services?
I kind of suspect we’ll see all three officers hired by the next town over, the town who will then be tasked with providing policing for this town.
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They contracted with the county for it. What happens to the officers I don’t know.
Which is worse?
I don’t know which is worse:
That police officers are making comments like this and they think it’s funny.
Or:
Police officers are making comments like this and they think it’s funny in 2022, more than 20 years into the 21st century.
You’d think people would be more evolved by now.
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When you live in a society that is essentially a covert caste system people will not evolve socially since they are hindered by the stagnancy of such a system and the people who have power doesn’t really want that to change.
Uh, now what
I just hope, for the residents there, they have some contingencies in place with this.
Because you can guarandamntee nobody from surrounding communities is going to cross jurisdictional lines to help.
Bad police, the minority, are a serious problem. But this is a rather extreme (without contextual reference) reaction to a bad cop.
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Bad police, the minority, are a serious problem. But this is a rather extreme (without contextual reference) reaction to a bad cop.
It really isn’t. If the local PD consists of four people, all of whom are Klansmen then my reaction would be to kill it with fire.
Going without law enforcement is not ideal. But it’s still less bad than going with “law enforcement” handled by the SA.
And I say this being the sort of white middle-aged middle class part of the demographic likely to be the last one on Niemöller’s lamentation list.
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Simply put: Firing bad cops and hiring good ones is better than the over reaction of no police at all.
Btw: I have no idea what you mean by SA.
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The county is taking over law enforcement.
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They'll find another cop job
Sadly the two fired cops have likely already been reemployed. The chief might even be eligible for some sort of pension or parting gifts.