A Georgia police officer will be fired after him telling a white woman she didn’t have to worry about him because she wasn’t black was caught on camera, The New York Times reports. A dashboard camera captured Lt. Greg Abbott of Georgia’s Cobb County Police Department having this exchange with a woman during a traffic stop in July 2016.
The woman was the passenger in the car Lt. Abbott stopped in suspicion of a DUI case. She grew nervous when the officer told her she could use her cell phone. With the phone in her lap, she didn’t want to move her hands because she had seen “way too many videos” about police behavior at traffic stops.
“But you’re not black,” Lt. Abbott is heard saying in the video recently obtained by an Atlanta news station through an open-records request. “Remember, we only kill black people. Yeah. We only kill black people, right?”
“We saw the video and we’re going to deal with it,” Chief Mike Register said in a video package produced by WSB-TV.
Chief Register also spoke at a press conference on Thursday, frowning upon Lt. Abbott’s response. “I’ve known Lt. Abbott for a number of years, and I’ve always perceived him to be an honorable man,” he revealed. “But he made a mistake.”
This isn’t the first time Cobb County has run into issues with race relations. Although the International Association of Chiefs of Police gave the county a high community approval rating, its report also gave off the impression of seeing “discriminatory and biased policing.”
Amidst some viewpoints that Lt. Abbott’s comments were sarcastic jokes, the officer’s lawyer believes he was trying to calm down the car’s passengers. “He was attempting to de-escalate a situation involving an uncooperative passenger,” Lance LoRusso said in a statement. “In context, his comments were clearly aimed at attempting to gain compliance by using the passenger’s own statements and reasoning to avoid making an arrest.”
Regardless of whether Lt. Abbott was trying to be sarcastic, comments like these are far from appropriate. It's good to see Lt. Abbott be punished for his actions.
