A police chief and an officer from Georgia have both lost their jobs after bodycam footage emerged of them using racial slurs at a Black Lives Matter protest.
WTVM reports that Chief Gene Allmond and Patrolman John Brooks have been removed from the Hamilton Police Department, with Allmond reportedly resigning and Brooks facing termination.
It’s thought that the officers were wearing body cameras at a BLM protest in Hamilton in June 2020 but thought they weren’t recording properly. Earlier this week, someone tried to use the cameras and found that the memory was full. They then discovered the footage when they downloaded the camera’s contents.
The Assistant to Hamilton Mayor Julie Brown says that the mayor and city council quickly removed both men from their positions after watching the video for the first time on Monday.
In the six-minute video, one man is off-camera and one man is on-camera, and both make comments involving racial slurs and explicit language—and make remarks about slavery and the Black community. The off-camera speaker also apparently refers to the fatal police shooting of 27-year-old Rayshard Brooks, who was killed in June 2020.
On Monday, Mayor Brown told WTVM that “the mayor and city council acted quickly to remove the Chief and patrolman after viewing the video for the first time.”
“It was disgusting,” Hamilton Mayor Pro-Tem Ransom Farley told the outlet. “The fact they were on duty ... when we found out they were terminated in an hour-and-a-half time.”
“I thank God, we caught it,” Farley said. “When you're a police officer and you have that type of frame of mind .... how can you protect and serve?”
