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”.
