A Georgia police chief and officer have resigned after they were caught using racial slurs before a Black Lives Matter protest in their community. Local ABC News affiliate WTVM9 obtained six minutes of bodycam footage, which revealed the hateful conversation that ended two careers.
The video comes from Hamilton, Georgia, where the Chief of Police Gene Allmond and Patrolman John Brooks used racial slurs before a BLM protest last year. An assistant to Hamilton Mayor Julie Brown told reporters that Allmond chose to resign when the video surfaced, while Brooks had to be terminated. The footage had reportedly been sitting on those cameras for months without review.
Videos by PopCulture.com
The department believed that the body cameras officers were waring during that protest in June of 2020 were not working properly, and they were put into storage. However, last week an officer from another department examined them and found that they were working fine — and that their memories were full. The incendiary footage was then turned over to Hamilton officials.
“F— protests… son of a b— what is the matter with these f—ing people?” Allmond said in the video. “I don’t own no slaves. My folks didn’t own no slaves. What are we talking about… 200 f—ing years ago?”
“I don’t know if this has any merit, back in the slave times, but there was a lot them mistreated. I don’t have any doubt about that,” Allmond continued. “But for the most part, it seems to me like, they furnished them a house to live in, they furnished ’em clothes to put on their back, they furnished ’em food to put on their table, and all they had to do was f—ing work.”
“And now, we give them all those things and they don’t have to work,” Brooks added. Elsewhere in the video, both men can be heard using the N-word and other profanities, along with more racist sentiments and historical revisionism.
Racial slurs aside, the treatment of slaves in America until the practice was abolished 155 years ago is not the pre-eminent concern of Black Lives Matter protests. Generally, those demonstrations are meant to protest the treatment of Black Americans today by police specifically. Allmond and Brooks misunderstood this point as a sign of the continued divide between anti-racist activists and the rest of the country.
Black Lives Matter remains a decentralized political movement, which means that no single organization controls its representation. It also means that its ideologies may vary between chapters and protests. According to MappingPoliceViolence.org, police killed at least 315 Black Americans in 2020, And 98.3 percent of police killings do not result in the officer being charged with a crime.
