In what has to be the best story of the pot calling the kettle black, a Bay Area police union says that Colin Kaepernick’s quiet protest against the national anthem is “harassing behavior.”
The head of the Santa Clara, Calif., police union wrote a letter Friday threatening to stop working San Francisco 49ers home games unless the team takes action against the controversial quarterback, NBC Bay Area reports.
The Santa Clara Police Officers’ Association said that failure to stop Kaepernick’s police-brutality protests—which take the form of sitting or kneeling during the national anthem—“could result in police officers choosing not to work at your facilities,” and implied that the 28-year-old quarterback’s actions constitute “harassing behavior” toward police.
Additionally, San Francisco cops earlier this week wrote their own letter demanding that Kaepernick apologize.
“We hope your organizations choose to do the right thing and at least apologize to the many officers Mr. Kaepernick has disrespected for no apparent reason,” San Francisco Police Officers Association President Martin Halloran wrote.
Some find it quite ironic that these demands are coming from unions that represent the very same police departments where members were caught in April in text messages calling people of color “cockroaches,” “barbarians” and, of course, the n-word; the San Francisco Police Department fired eight cops last year for just that.
Just last December, Santa Clara County jail officers also had their own racist text-message debacle—same town, same field.
Regardless of the so-called backlash, many other players are refusing to stand for the anthem, including fellow 49er Eric Reid and Seattle Seahawks corner Jeremy Lane, who remained on the bench as his teammates stood for “The Star-Spangled Banner” before their game against the Raiders.
Read more at NBC Bay Area.