Racist jokes are no longer a laughing matter for the Ferguson, Mo. police department.
After the Department of Justice exposed the police force’s history of racial discrimination and abuse of power, they also uncovered many unfunny emails, written at the expense of the Black population they were charged with protecting.
One of the officers now on the outs because of the jokes is the former supervisor of Darren Wilson, the officer responsible for the shooting death of teen Michael Brown. The St. Louis Post-Dispatch reported that Sgt. William Mudd resigned Thursday after being revealed as the officer who joked about a black people and abortion in a workplace email.
Mudd was the first officer on the scene shortly after Brown’s shooting death and testified to the Grand Jury about the incident Sept. 16.
From the St. Louis American:
Mudd reportedly was responsible for emailing (in May 2011) a joke about CrimeStoppers paying a black woman to have an abortion. The DoJ noted that no one at the time was censured for circulating the racial jokes, which in fact tended to be forwarded to others approvingly.
Mudd’s finding humor in this joke about a black woman’s abortion stopping crime puts into perspective his testimony before the grand jury on September 16. It also shows something about the mindset of the first police supervisor to arrive on the scene of an officer-involved shooting where the deceased was left lying on the pavement for four and a half hours while canines were deployed for crowd control.
Read the full story at the St. Louis American.
