Peoria Police Put Out Recruiting Poster Telling Recruits To Come Play ‘Call Of Duty’ In Real Life
from the pew-pew-pew dept
Whatever your thoughts on policing in general in America, I would hope it would be largely uncontroversial to state that a huge percentage of Americans believe that police are generally over-militarized and at least slightly a little too trigger happy, especially when it comes to engaging minority communities. If you somehow think that there isn’t at least a perception problem among the public here, then you probably don’t need to keep reading the rest of this post, because it’s not going to make sense to you.
But if you do understand that there is some level of a problem here, your skin will almost certainly crawl when you see the recruiting poster the Peoria, IL police put out on social media to try to get young recruits.
A Peoria, Illinois police department tried to recruit new officers with a Call of Duty-inspired campaign on social media, and it was as tone-deaf as you’d imagine. The post, originally shared on the Peoria Police Department’s social media page, showed three white men posing with guns while wearing tactical gear. “Stop playing games and answer the Call of Duty,” the post reads, with the “Call of Duty” portion of the poster written in the same text as Activision’s wildly popular (and more than occasionally problematic) first-person shooter franchise.
Imagine just how tone-deaf you have to be in the current climate of policing in America to put this poster out. First, recruiting people with images of police in tactical gear pointing guns is precisely the wrong message you want to put out to a community in Peoria that is concerned about policing. Doubly so when the image is of three white cops in a community with a sizable black population.
And now add to all of that the simple fact that Call of Duty is a game in which you primarly spend a great deal of time shooting individuals. Like, with bullets and stuff. You know, to kill them. And, sure, it’s a video game and in that context I don’t have an issue with the game itself. But in a society where many believe that police far too often see themselves as gun-toting enforcers through violence, recruiting against a video game like CoD is absurd.
Police Chief Eric Echevarria eventually took the post down and apologized in a way that I will say does ring through as genuine.
It was never my intention to offend any of our community members with the recruitment flyer that was posted on our Facebook page yesterday. It was simply a recruitment image I thought would appeal and connect to a younger generation. I take ownership of this, and I sincerely apologize. Our goal is to recruit the best and most qualified officers for this police department in the most caring and respectful way.
It’s probably a good move, because we haven’t even gotten into the issue of intellectual property. The poster does name the game and use the same or similar font for the game’s branding when doing so. While I’m not sure there’s an actual trademark infringement case to be made here, I am also quite sure that Activision probably wouldn’t appreciate the use of its product name and branding in this way.
And so the poster is down, but the damage is done. In a community where fear of police violence is very real, that community got a reminder of how some police officers see their jobs.
Filed Under: call of duty, eric echevarria, illinois, peoria, peoria pd, police
Comments on “Peoria Police Put Out Recruiting Poster Telling Recruits To Come Play ‘Call Of Duty’ In Real Life”
Next will be Castle Wolfenstein…
Re:
The people the cops are trying to recruit don’t like Wolfenstein, you kill Nazis in that game, and it hurts their feelings.
So instead of being the one getting SWAT-teamed, the pitch is to be a part of SWAT team? On the one hand I get it, on the other hand… it doesn’t make it any less fucking tasteless.
Re: COD was a bad choice.
COD is a subset of First Person Shooter called a man-killer, in which the common targets are other people, often in a war setting. (A lot of FPS, though I don’t know the majority, involve shooting bugs or robots. Zombies and Imperial Stormtroopers present a grey zone.) WWII shooters justified that the men were Nazis, but the modern warfare games worry less about the ethical ramifications of killing the enemy because Uncle Sam commands you.
And yes, our new recruits to the police force will infer not only that they get to secure houses in SWAT raids, but that frequently they’ll get to shoot the bad guys as well. If they get killology training, that’ll only reinforce their path to acorn shooters.
A long time ago, I played SWAT IV which was more of a tactical sim based on municipal SWAT teams that specialize on hostage-barricade situations.
In SWAT IV it was super important to not kill civilians. Doing so results in instant mission failure. Even killing the perps cost points and could cost the mission. Eventually I stopped taking lethal weapons at all, counting on my team to do lethal takedowns in that tiny window where baddies were leveling their gun but hadn’t quite shot me yet. (My reflexes just weren’t that good.) I died a lot.
Most of the game was about blocking access paths, stacking up on doors and gathering intel to see if we needed to go loud or pick the lock and go in quietly.
All this is to say, a SWAT sim that was trying hard to sell its SWATness was far, far removed from any of the COD games, even early COD titles which were about shooting Nazis in WWII Europe.
This seems like a good time for a reminder that much of what cops do to our own citizens would be classified as war crimes if our soldiers did it to civilians, or even enemy combatants in some cases.
Say what you will, their mayor is trill as fuck.
Bro in the front is on the hunt for some lemon pound cake.
Sadly, it is more realistic to tell people that they can get a job that lets them reenact a violent shooter rather than to tell people that they can get a job that pays well enough that they can play the Sims and afford to design their own house.
Comparing gunning people down to playing a video game is really gross.
Our goal is to recruit the best and most qualified officers for this police department in the most caring and respectful way.
‘… Which I did by referencing a game series where you shoot your problems until they are no longer problems, only realizing after the fact that might not have been the best choice.’
I really hope he’s just as stupid as he wants people to think he is because if he did that deliberately that paints an absolutely horrifying picture of the sort of people he wants in his department.
Re:
And the difference between Call of Duty and the police department is that you can reload your game in CoD to bring the people you shouldn’t have killed back to life*.
*Except during online play, of course.
I believe the most realistic COD game should be mentioned, although it was never released
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yuTkgi7scKo
I do wonder what a similar SWAT game will look like
Never satisfied
Some people are never satisfied. The cops finally start using truth in advertising and everyone loses their minds.
This is just another incarnation of the “guns keep people safe” fantasy, which is, of course, DEEPLY rooted in racist fear. You don’t really think that that “home intruder” they say we all need to protect ourselves against is WHITE, do you? This is primal ethnic fear that stems from guilt over past genocide and stolen land.
I myself need no weapons to keep me safe. My people were in Germany when all that shit was going down. One day these fools may learn that nothing can protect you from your own cowardice.
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In the vast majority of cases, yes. Why else is the operative term ethnic minority?
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I dunno, where I live it’s incredibly common to think of Hayes and Komisarjevsky when people say “home invasion”…
The problem is
They’re showing where their heads are actually at. FTP.
Actually, I would argue the poster is in fact useful. It’s an excellent commercial for where not to move so as to reduce one’s chances of being swatted.
This is how you recruit police officers that will promptly respond to falling acorns with deadly force.
Re:
Hey, I genuinely thought the acorn was a grenade! It has that cup on the bottom that’s patterned like one.
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More anti-police hate speech from this pro-neo-Marxist, pro-gr00mer site!
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Cool comment, Scooter. Please point out where I’ve been either pro Marxist or pro groomer.
I’ll wait….
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You contribute to a site that has an open pro-neo-Marxist, pro-degenerate/gr00mer/LGBTQ+2SPtranskids editorial bias. You are who you associate with.
But at least you didn’t deny your blog post is anti-police hate speech.
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You vote republican and are christian.
I’m assuming you rape your children.
Re: Re: Re:2 Christianity and CSA
Republican officials do seem to like re-legalizing child marriage. Tennessee, for instance.
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Can’t we just round all of them up in the colosseum and nuke them from orbit like a rapture?
…Mmm, that arouses me intensely.
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So, how much did Russia pay you to be that much of a bootlicker?
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Actual Marxist find people like you hilarious. You think acknowledging that LGBTQ people are human beings deserving of human rights to be a “neo-Marxist” concept. When you vomit buzz word soup, you reveal your ignorance and hate. It only says bad things about you, not about the people you spew your hatred toward.
Re: Re: Re:
You are a member of a social media website that has an open pro-neo-Nazi, pro-degenerate/gr00mer/thinking-about-the-genitalia-of-kids editorial bias. You are who you associate with.
But at least you didn’t deny your comments are anti-citizen (including police) hate speech.
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So you admit you’re just deliberately lying.
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How long have you got? You might be waiting forever.
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If police want to be criminals and murders than they deserve to be hated.
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You forgot /s on your remark. Because no one is that much of a boot licker.
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Their tongue is brown with layers of tan polish.
Still have yet to demonstrate the marxism or groomer-orientated content. We all watched you move the goalposts.
So they wanted to appeal to the younger crowd with their 1970s television stock mustacioed porkers? Hitting the full stereotype bingo, good work that.
The cops probably use similar language to that spoken in game.
Recrutment Poster
I wonder how the police dept would react if someone decided to “prove” themselves to the dept by acting that game towards the police dept in that city. It would have to be against the member of the police force because, first, they are doing the recruiting, second, it wouldn’t be fair to go against the general population as they are not armed nor protected by military gear, and third, you’d want to go against the ‘best’.
Huh?
No. Quite the opposite. For all their training and methods they fail the basic methods of a military force. No discipline. No common sense.
And no, it’s a small minority that think cops should have lesser weapons.
Generally, there’s no concern there. Sorey, you maybe got your towns mixed up?
So, are you sure… or not. Why not just reach out for an actually comment from them. Or the people you think are so worried about the police.
“come play Call of Duty in real life”
If you read is as: come to our offices to play CoD with us, it would actually make America safer… by keeping the police off the streets.