A Philadelphia Fire Department paramedic is under fire for posting this picture with the caption: “Our real enemy.” The caption also said “Need 2 stop pointing guns at each other & at the ones that’s legally killing innocents.” Marcell Salters has also published highly antagonistic language toward police officers. He has since apologized but some have called for his punishment or termination. In the meantime, New York Mayor Bill de Blasio is under attack after Ismaaiyl Brinsley effectively executed two police officers over his anger with the recent decisions by grand juries in Missouri and New York. police have been protesting what they view as de Blasio’s unfair portrayals of police after the decision, including turning their backs on the mayor when he came to give a press conference on the murders.
Salters
Marcell Salters has been denounced for his attack on officers who often protect paramedics at accident and crime scenes. In now deleted comments, Salters said that he “never did or will like police” and “[b]ecause of what i do i have to work with them but dont have to like them . . . There are numerous crooked & corrupted cops (mostly white) & mostly they harass, beat, or kill innocents (mostly blks).”
He has since apologized and posted the following: “I would like to deeply apologize to anyone i have offended. That post was out of anger of what is going on around the world (mike brown, eric garner & etc) & past experiences that i have had with the police. . . My intentions was not to slander or hurt anyone or my brothers in blue. Again i am sorry.”
I have previously written about concerns that public employees are increasingly being disciplined for actions in their private lives or views or associations outside of work. We have previously seen teachers (here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here), here, here, students (here and here) and other public employees (here and here and here) fired for their private speech or conduct, including school employees fired for posing in magazines (here), appearing on television shows in bikinis (here), or having a career in the adult entertainment industry (here).
One different wrinkle is that Joseph Schulle, head of the firefighters’ union Local 22, said that Salters could be disciplined because he allegedly made a comment about the post while on duty. That creates a different context than many of the prior cases above where comments or postings were made entirely during off-hours or outside of public jobs. It is not clear what the comment was that is being isolated as a possible basis for discipline however.
I tend to view these cases from a first amendment perspective. I find Salters’ comments to be highly offensive and wrong. However, I do believe that he has a right to say them just as others have a right to denounced them. While such comments obviously make for tense working conditions, some of us believe that free speech requires bright-line rules of protection even for hateful speech like that of Marcell Salters.
The uproar of police in Philadelphia has joined an equal if not greater outcry of officers in New York.
Ismaaiyl Brinsley, 28, the killer of officers Wenjian Liu, 32, and Rafael Ramos, 40, had a history of violence and mental instability. He shot the officers as they sat in their patrol car in Brooklyn on Saturday before he ran to a subway station and shot himself. Only hours earlier, he shot and wounded his 29-year-old ex-girlfriend, Shaneka Thompson, at her home in Baltimore, Maryland. After shooting Thompson, Brinsley threatened on Instagram to kill police officers while referencing the New York and Missouri grand jury decisions: “They Take 1 of Ours… Let’s Take 2 of Theirs #ShootThePolice #RIPEricGarner #RIPMike Brown. This May Be My Final Post.”
Before the murders, Brinsley reportedly struck up a conversation with two men. According to the police, he asked the men “for their gang affiliation; he asked them to follow him on Instagram; and then he says: ‘Watch what I’m going to do.'” That is when he walked past the patrol car, circled it and then crossed the street to come up behind the car. That is when he fired four bullets through the front passenger window, killing the officers.
Police directed their anger in part at de Blasio who has been viewed as supporting the protests against police after the decision of the New York grand jury. The Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association even went as far as having officers to sign a petition calling for Mr de Blasio to be barred from attending their funerals if they were killed in the line of duty. There is also a growing racial rift over de Blasio’s policies. A poll last week found seventy percent of black people approved of the mayor’s performance while only 32 percent of white people supported him. Yet, he had received good polling numbers over his handling of protests following the decisions in New York and Missouri.
po@minutebol said ..
The biggest danger we face are people who think in extremes, who see the world in black and white, not in the infinite range of grays it features…
First, if you are even slightly referring to me, you obviously have noticed or read very little of what I have said over time. Worse, you know nothing of how I’ve acted here and half a world away. I have finally learned that being an optimist is a fools position.You illuminated that for me once again. Thanks.
Next, we are not going to agree. I don’t know your background, and you do not know mine or why I think as I do. I am too weary of this general conversation to bother with an iteration of how I came to my feelings.
Finally…the”give” looked for by others on this thread is simply proffering some solutions, not just a negative retrospective. Perhaps none of us have anything to suggest. That is the tragedy. I am at the point where I refuse to go through all of this contention again as a participant in the discussion, let alone on the street.
I am done with it. I wish NYC and Ferguson/St Louis good luck. They will need it.
Also po the point is a black female supervisor would never stand still for a racist beat down of a black man. This was cop vs. criminal. A recidivist criminal with many arrests. He was an accident waiting to happen.
Look if Stephen hawking tried to run down a cop in his wheelchair……well I can almost guarantee you a bad result.
Pagones is by any chance?
Sorry I slipped and it posted before I could finish.
It was Michael Browns action that to his death. Violent self destructive actions that he exhibited many times before. The narrative that the media and the racial arsonist are trying to sell is just nonsense. He was not a young scholar who meekly stood there with his hands up. He was a violent drugged up felon who decided to fight with the cops and died as a result of it.
We have all been here before with Sharpton et al. Do you know who Steven
Wilson said he did not know about the robbery when he stopped Brown. He also could not have known anything about his background. So that does not enter into what happened that day.
I do not know how you can call it an “accident” the opfficer used a chokehold that the NYPD does not allow. That is not an accident. He said 11 times I can’t breathe” that was not an accident that they ignored him.
For the sake of argument what if Garner had been a white man or a woman? Would you still t hink that it was merely an “accident”
Had they behaved as you say in the 70″s, I lived in NYC from 76 on and don’t think it would have been allowed in those days, the cop would have been brought up on charges.
And what is your point exactly with the black supervisor narrative?
So Trooper, are you saying that :
A/ Mike Brown was a convicted criminal?
And that he therefore deserved being shot?
Did he graduate high school and was going to college?
B/ Garner was choked to death, with a move that is illegal and unlawful. Is that so or am I mistaken?
Po let me get this straight. Mike Brown is not a criminal? His record of felonies and assault make him what exactly?
A future college student.
Did you see the video of how he was studying in that convenience store ten minutes before he ran into Officer Wilson?
Weak sauce buddy.
You did not hear about the black female supervisor because the press does not want that to be part of the “narrative.” Everything that happened to Garner happened at her direction. They tried to talk to him. He refused to listen. This was not his first time at the rodeo. It was an unfortunate accident that it happened the way that it did. Not murder. Not even close.
You know how they would handled that in the 1970’s? They would have whacked him on the knee and he would fell down like a tree. Then they would have cuffed him and brought him in. Brutal? Sure. But he would have been alive today.
trooperyork
Where is your give po? I haven’t seen any. Enlighten me.
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Well. my give, Trooper, if there is one, is my refusal to demonize any side. It is my refusal to claim that Officer WIlson was racist, it is to give him the benefit of the doubt and to instead care little about why he shot Mike Brown, but to call for systematic changes to protect good cops as well as civilians.
Also, you have decided that Mike Brown punched Off. Wilson. There is no proof of such. That is a conclusion to which you arrived in order to support your points that Mike Brown was a criminal and therefore deserved what happened to him, and Off Wilson was justified in the shooting.
I know a lot about brutal corrupt cops Lee. There were many of them in the 1970’s. I remember when I had to pay the guys on the Pad when they came into the bar where we had the Joker Poker. It is not like that anymore. Not even close. The NYPD is a multiracial credit to the city that does the best job in the country if not the world.
They deserve a lot better than Bill De Blasio and the protesters who are even now destroying the Christmas shopping season for a bunch of hard hit retailers.
Given that the grand jury was fed lies by the Da, and he has admitted that, there is dispute as to what really happened with Brown. This is the trouble. They worked so hard to protect themselves that no one, not you nor I , know what really happened. 12 shots certainly seems excessive.
I do not thin I have even heard about the supervisor. If it were I and he repeatedly said he could not breathe I would make sure the EMT, who was also very wrong and derelict in her duties actually listened to his chest and directed medical treatment to be administered. Selling untaxed cigarettes does not deserve the death penalty.
There is plenty of blame to go around in the Garner case.
Just finished reading book called THE BRASS WALL the betrayal of undercover detective #4126, David Kocieniewski, 2003, Holt and Co.
It is an appalling account of betrayal and closed ranks in order to protect a cop and his son against good cops who were trying to get a bad cop, connected via his father, a high up cop in the NYPD.
The thin blue line whether in the incident now in NYC, or before, heck look at serpico, is hurtful to all, citizens and good cops.
Let me ask you a question Lee. I don’t think the Michael Brown case is really in dispute. He punched a cop in the face and tried to steal his gun. I know you don’t support that.
I was a lot more troubled by the Eric Garner case. That was simply a tragedy. Everything that happened was at the direction of a black female supervisor who everyone conveniently forgets. What if you where at the scene and had to subdue Garner? What would you have done?
It is not a false narrative. You support Michael Brown and Eric Garner and the “false narrative” that they were killed by racist cops.
If that is not the case than I apologize.
I accept your apology. I do not believe they were killed by :”racist” cops. I think there was enough there for a grand jury to indict had they been given the true information (see earlier post where McCullough said he knew his witnesses were not telling the truth to the grand jury). It was a stacked deck and appears to be so in Garner’s case as well.
The police too often seem to use excessive force, the recent story of the 72 year old man who was tasered or the 12 year old boy, he could have been maimed, he did not have to be killed. I think some of this comes from the militarization of the police. I think Ferguson would not have turned into what it did had not the police overreacted with tanks, tear gas etc.
(Just as I think the governor calling out the national guard before the grand jury had spoken was an enticement to come to the streets.
Sadly it seems to be, and usually appears to be a handful of thugs and bad guys who do the looting etc but then it is put on the group of protestors as a whole the majority of whom are peaceful protesters.
leejcaroll – McCollugh did not stack the deck. In fact, he put everything on the table and let the GJ sort it out. BTW, they were not his witnesses. They were people who claimed to be witnesses and with the political atmosphere the way it was, I would have put everyone on the stand, too. That way no one could complain that the fix was in.
I meant to say unnecessarily brutal. Justin Volpe got exactly what he deserved.
(Of course you would not know who that is but still)
Where is your give po? I haven’t seen any. Enlighten me.
I do not embrace bad cops anymore than you do. I think if they break the law they should be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. Corrupt cops should be thrown in jail and they should throw away the key. Including those who are necessarily brutal in arresting suspects.
The biggest danger we face are people who think in extremes, who see the world in black and white, not in the infinite range of grays it features, who are right and others wrong, who can read into other people’s minds and know that they only wish evil.
Trooper, it is a mindset like yours that scares the crap out of me. It is the mindset of terrorists of every ilk, whether islamist or nationalist. It is one that shuts off all debate, it is the enemy of democracy, there is no give and take, and if allowed to fester… i fear for us.
It is not a false narrative. You support Michael Brown and Eric Garner and the “false narrative” that they were killed by racist cops.
If that is not the case than I apologize.