Florida Cop Suspended Over Racist Instagram Posts
Another day, another cop being racist in public. Today’s star is Jacksonville sheriff’s lieutenant Trudy Callahan, who was suspended from her job for 10 days over a series of Instagram posts, including an image of a black man lying on a broken fence captioned “get your Hood Hammock.”
The offending posts also included an image of a black man standing in line at a drive-through ATM, captioned, “When you need money to get gas for the car you can’t drive up to the ATM,” and an image of a police sketch of a man with dreadlocks, captioned, “The police really expect somebody to find this nigga. I know 6 niggas that look like this.”
Callahan seems to have repurposed both the “hood hammock” photo and the police sketch from pre-existing memes (the sketch even does that horrible screencapped-Twitter-text-on-Instagram thing.) In other words, her casual racism was compounded by the grievous offense taking other people’s jokes on the internet and not crediting them.
Nor are these Callahan’s first offenses: In 2003, she received more civilian complaints than any other officer on the Jacksonville force, the Florida Times-Union reports. According to a local CBS affiliate, those complaints included accusations of harassment and unnecessary force.
Let Callahan’s posts be a lesson to cops everywhere: If you’re going to do something racist, make sure your gun at least goes off in the process. Otherwise, you might actually face some consequences for it.