ONCE AGAIN, A POLICE OFFICER HAS THREATENED SOMEONE ON SOCIAL MEDIA

… Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (OAC) was threatened by a Louisiana Police Officer

When will they ever learn to avoid offering any negative comments on Facebook?

I am seriously surprised that a couple of Louisiana Police Officers actually went on Facebook and suggested that the Freshman Democratic Representative from New York, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (OAC) should be shot.  Any police officer that doesn’t know about people that put that kind of comment on Facebook, and what happens to them, deserves whatever comes down.

Charlie Rispoli, an officer with the police force in Gretna, La., wrote on Facebook: “This vile idiot [OAC] needs a round........and I don’t mean the kind she used to serve.”   He was referring to a gunshot at the US Rep, and that OAC’s  earlier career was as a bartender.  It was not clear from Rispoli’s post, which has since been deleted, whether he knew he was sharing and commenting on a story that came from a satire’s website.

Now, I’ll be one of those that also says that I don’t appreciate some of the things that have been supposedly quoted from what these four Freshmen, non-white, congresspersons have said.  Some of those supposed quotes are not what I would want to hear from my congressperson.  But those that voted for those four individuals will have to decide if they want to continue to supporting their representatives.  It’s not up to us or any US police officer to make such a judgement.

The quote from Officer Rispoli was brought to us by Nola.com that originally reported the Facebook post and they acquired an image of it before it was deleted.

Rispoli was fired along with another officer, Angelo Varisco, who had “liked” the Facebook post, Gretna City Police Chief, Arthur Lawson reported this at his news conference.

“This incident, we feel, has been an embarrassment to our department,” Lawson said. “These officers have certainly acted in a manner which was unprofessional, alluding to a violent act be conducted against a sitting US congresswoman, a member of our government and we are not going to tolerate that.”

OAC has blamed President Trump’s rhetoric for Rispoli’s comment.

“This is Trump’s goal when he uses targeted language & threatens elected officials who don’t agree w/ his political agenda,” she wrote on Twitter. “It’s authoritarian behavior. The President is sowing violence. He’s creating an environment where people can get hurt & he claims plausible deniability.”

OAC and the  three other minority Freshman lawmakers that have been dubbed “The Squad” by the president and they have become frequent targets of President Trump.  Trump has said many negative things about these very progressive four Freshmen.  The president has said these four citizens and members of Congress should “go back” to the “totally broken and crime infested places from which they came.”

The reality is that three of the Freshmen females were born in the US, and the forth one was born in Somalia, but early on she became a US Citizen.

President Trump and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi both face battles with these four Democratic Congresswomen, now known as ”The squad." 

So, here's what you need to know.

The firings of the two Louisiana officers comes amid a reckoning with racist and violent social media posts by other police and federal law enforcement officers.  As these posts have been made public, firings and investigations have followed across multiple departments.

Lawson, the police chief, did not respond to a request for comment from The Washington Post.  In an interview with Nola.com, Lawson initially called Rispoli’s comment “disturbing” and probably in violation of department social media policies, but he stopped short of describing it as a threat.

By Monday afternoon, however, Lawson told reporters that Rispoli and Varisco had been fired.  The chief said the department had inquired with Facebook to learn whether other officers had “liked”, commented or otherwise interacted with Facebook before terminating Varisco.

Lawson reiterated at the news conference that he did not think Rispoli’s Facebook post was a legitimate threat.

Rispoli was a 14-year veteran of the Gretna Police Department. Varisco had served for less than three years.

Both men performed security detail in a local government building that contains a courtroom and Gretna City Hall, and Rispoli recently worked as part of a program that supervised people placed under house arrest.

Neither had served on the streets as patrol officers, and the only two arrests made between them took place inside the courtroom.

After speaking with Rispoli, Lawson said Monday afternoon that the officer was apologetic for the post.  He indicated that Rispoli had made a bad decision “in the heat of the moment.”

Rispoli could not be reached for comment.

Belinda Constant, the Democratic mayor of Gretna, a city of about 18,000 outside New Orleans, did not reply to a request for comment. Nor did any of the four city council members.

Eva Malecki, a spokeswoman for the US Capitol Police, declined to say whether the agency viewed the posting as a threat.

“We do not discuss how we carry out our protective responsibilities for Congress,” she said..

Police officers nationwide have faced waves of scrutiny following investigations of social media posts by 3,500 current and former police officers published by the nonprofit Plain View Project.  In Philadelphia alone, 72 officers were pulled from street duty. The department plans to fire 13 of them for violent, racist and homophobic posts.

Rispoli’s comments appeared on his page marked for friends and friends of friends only. It was not clear how his comments became circulated.

“Whether you agree or disagree with the message of these elected officials and how frustrated you may or may not get, this certainly is not the type of thing that a public servant should be posting,” said Lawson, the police chief.

Copyright G. Ater  2019