© 2021 Chaos+Comrades. All Rights Reserved
Earlier this month, footage of officers in Wilmington, North Carolina verbally attacking Black people and using hate speech surfaced during the department’s monthly video review. As a result, James Gilmore, Corporal Jesse Moore II, and Officer Kevin Piner, all veteran officers hired in the late 1990s, were fired immediately.
Their case raises questions around why some police departments are able to hold their officers accountable while many others are not. Most notably, the Wilmington case contrasts with the case of the Louisville, Kentucky officers involved in Breonna Taylor’s murder, who have not yet been arrested.
At one point in the Wilmington video, Piner can be heard complaining to Gilmore that “kneeling down with the Black folks” was the department’s “only priority.” Piner and Gilmore also spoke derogatively about their fellow Black officers, including Police Chief Donny Williams.
Piner later took a phone call from Moore, who expressed his frustration with a woman he arrested the day before and referred to her as the n-word.
“She needed a bullet in her head right then and move on,” Moore added. “Let’s move the body out of the way and keep going.”
Piner then expressed that he thought a civil war was approaching, and that he couldn’t wait to go out and “start slaughtering them f***ing n***ers.”
“That’ll put ’em back about four or five generations,” he said.
Investigators concluded that Moore and Piner violated the department’s policy around the use of inappropriate slurs. All three were found to be in violation of the department’s standard code of conduct and the officers have since been terminated without recommendation to be rehired in Wilmington.
The case of the Wilmington officers is just one piece in the greater picture of widespread responses to the Black Lives Matter movement. While those officers lost their jobs, others, such as those involved in the murder of Breonna Taylor– Brett Hankinson, Jon Mattingly, and Myles Cosgrove– have not been criminally charged.
The officers in Taylor’s case entered her Louisville, Kentucky apartment on March 13. They had a no-knock warrant and mistook Taylor’s home for another one in which they were supposed to search for drugs. The police entered with no announcement and without identifying themselves. Startled, Taylor’s boyfriend, Kenneth Walker, fired one shot. Officers fired back and hit Taylor with several bullets.
Brett Hankinson was terminated for blindly firing into the home and was the only officer who faced any consequences, while the remaining officers were placed on administrative leave.
This is unacceptable. #JusticeForBreonnaTaylor #ArrestTheCopsWhoKilledBreonnaTaylor pic.twitter.com/p4AI2tOAsa
— Rae The Writer (@WriteAsRae) June 23, 2020
The two cases expose how police departments across the country differ vastly in their response to police misconduct. The fate of “bad cops” is often determined by the whims of individual employers, rather than any wide-ranging laws that hold law enforcement accountable. The radically different responses in the cases of the Wilmington and Louisville police officers make the case that we need sweeping, uniform and over-arching nationwide police reform.
© 2021 Chaos+Comrades. All Rights Reserved
