Surely, there are good cops. White people keep telling us about them and about their blue lives mattering, so they must exist. Still, with so many recordings surfacing where bad cops can be seen and heard doing and saying bad things, one can’t help but imagine how much cop malfeasance goes on when they’re not being recorded. Suddenly it’s hard not to suspect that the bunch-spoiling bad apples actually represent the core (pun intended) values of the bunch.
For example, three North Carolina police officers accidentally recorded themselves plotting to wage a war against Black people and the audio footage of their conversation was discovered purely by chance. What if that footage wasn’t discovered? Would they not likely be considered among the “good cops?”
The Washington Post reports that Wilmington, N.C., officers Michael “Kevin” Piner, Cpl. Jesse E. Moore II and James “Brian” Gilmore were all fired Wednesday after a sergeant conducting routine video reviews on June 4 happened across a nearly two-hour-long recording from Piner’s patrol car created by an “accidental activation,” according to the Wilmington Police Department’s report.
The conversation caught on tape reportedly started with the officers lamenting the wave of Black Lives Matter protests sparked by the death of George Floyd, but it quickly devolved into a verbal firefight of racial slurs and murder fantasy that began with Piner getting salty over local police “kneeling down with the Black folks.” (Wait, are the kneeling cops the good cops? I mean, they’ll take a knee but will they take a stand against systemic racism in policing?)
Anyway...from the Post:
Gilmore, hired by the department in 1997, said that whites were now “worshiping blacks,” adding he’d seen a video of a “fine looking white girl and this little punk pretty boy bowing down and kissing their toes.”
The two then complained about black officers on the force, calling one a “piece of s—-” and complaining that another was “sitting on his a—” during the protests. “Let’s see how his boys take care of him when s—- gets rough, see if they don’t put a bullet in his head,” Piner said.
Piner soon left to check out an alarm, investigators found. Later, Moore, who also was hired in 1997, called him to describe a recent arrest of a black woman, repeatedly calling her a racial slur.
“She needed a bullet in the head right then and move on,” Moore said of the woman. “Let’s move the body out of the way and keep going.”
Later, while complaining about a black judge whom Moore called a “f——— negro magistrate,” Moore added, “It’s bad man because not all black people are like that.”
“Most of ‘em,” Piner responded.
“90 percent of ‘em, Kevin, 90 f——— percent of ‘em,” Moore said.
Soon, Piner turned the conversation to his belief that a civil war was imminent and his intention to buy high-powered weaponry. After saying he was ready to “slaughter” black people, he added, “God I can’t wait.”
Just saying...imagine if these cops didn’t fuck around and accidentally record themselves. They would be patrolling streets full of Black citizens right now and they’d be packing all their rage, implicit bias and homicidal fantasies right along with their batons and service pistols. All cops are good cops until they’re caught being bad cops.
Of course, like most racist ass racists, these racist-ass racists claimed they aren’t racist at all and that their racist conversation was just them “venting” out their frustrations over the “stress of today’s climate in law enforcement,” according to a June 9 Internal Investigations report.
Moore told investigators he “doesn’t normally speak like that but was feeding off Officer Piner,” the Post reports. Piner—having been thrown all the way under the bus by Moore, which leads me to ask, “Oh, what to do about all this blue-on-blue crime?”—told investigators that the recording is “embarrassing” and that concerns for his family’s safety led him to a “breaking point.”
Wilmington Police Chief Donny Williams—who is Black and was just hired as chief on Tuesday—said he would “ensure none of the men could be rehired by the city and would ask state officials to review their law enforcement certifications,” the Post reports.
“There are certain behaviors that one must have in order to be a police officer, and these three officers have demonstrated that they do not possess it,” he said. “When I first learned of these conversations, I was shocked, saddened and disgusted. There is no place for this behavior in our agency or our city, and it will not be tolerated.”
Hey, maybe that means Williams knows where the good cops are. We really need to get to the bottom of that mystery.