Phillip White wrote that ‘I
will use my God given and law appointed right and duty to kill you’ and alluded
to slogans used in protests against police violence
A police officer in San Jose,
California, has been suspended for tweets he sent from his personal account in
which he made threatening remarks towards protesters marching against police
violence.
“By the way if anyone feels
they can’t breathe or their lives matter I’ll be at the movies tonight, off duty,
carrying my gun,” one tweet by Phillip White said.
The next said: “Threaten me or
my family and I will use my God given and law appointed right and duty to kill
you,” and was marked with the hashtag “#CopsLivesMatter”.
The tweets, and then later
White’s Twitter account, were deleted, but not before Buzzfeed managed to take
a screengrab of them.
The internet reacted swiftly to
his remarks. A petition on Change.org demanding that he be fired now has over
12,000 signatures.
White is a 20-year veteran of
the San Jose police department, and has previously won plaudits for community
outreach in gang prevention.
He was also an assistant
basketball coach at Menlo College, a business school, which has now severed
ties with him. “The college will not be represented by expressions of
intolerance and bigotry on the campus, on social media, or on the internet,”
the university said in a statement.
Police chief Larry Esquivel
announced that White would be on paid leave pending an investigation. “The San
Jose police department recognises the sensitive nature of this matter,” he
said, adding that the tweets did not represent “the thoughts or feelings of the
men and women here at the San Jose police department”.
“Nor do we condone this type of
behaviour,” the statement said.
Sam Liccardo, the mayor-elect
of San Jose, told the Mercury-News that White’s tweeting “undermines everything
that our officers are working to accomplish in our police department to build
relationships with trust in our community”.
