The Philadelphia Police Department has a Racism Problem

By Reggie Shuford, Executive Director, ACLU of Pennsylvania

The job of a police officer is to serve and protect the community, no matter the racial, ethnic, religious, or socio-economic status of that community. Real justice is blind, and police officers are the front-line arbiters of justice in America.

But as a new, comprehensive report and database from the Plain View Project makes clear, many of the police officers in Philadelphia and across the country operate under a vision of justice that is anything but unbiased.

The analysis, which was first reported by Buzzfeed News, provides a searchable, public database of deeply disturbing social media posts from police officers in Philadelphia and seven other police departments, including York, Pennsylvania. While the names of people who interacted with the posts have been redacted, the names of the police officers who authored the posts have not.

The bottom line? The Philadelphia Police Department has a racism problem. Fortunately, the Plain View Project database names names, revealing exactly which officers are not fit to fulfill their duties to serve and protect.

The deep-seeded racism plaguing the department won’t be unraveled overnight. While the police officers whose hate-filled posts have been exposed should be dismissed immediately, the racism in the Philadelphia Police Department can’t and won’t be rooted out until the department faces the issue head-on. After all, this culture most assuredly runs deeper than the police officers who made publicly viewable social media posts.

People of color already have legitimate reasons for lacking trust in law enforcement in Philadelphia; our ongoing litigation over stop-and-frisk practices has proved that time and again. The behavior exposed by this report provides even more evidence for why that distrust is warranted. Hundreds of police officers in Philadelphia openly express hostility and antipathy toward the people they “serve.”

And the report only exposes those officers who did not hide their views behind a privacy wall. How many more officers say the same thing under the cloak of stronger privacy settings?

Over the past decade, with the emergence of smartphone technology, the epidemic of police violence driven by apparent racial animus has been well-documented. While many thought that the use of police body cameras would offer a measure of accountability that might prevent police killings, those hopes have been dashed as police officer after police officer wins acquittal in cases where their killing of unarmed civilians was caught on video.

The disturbing social media posts uncovered by the Plain View Project reinforce the sad reality that police can get away with anything, from brazen racism to murder.

Police culture in Philadelphia and across the nation must change. But it can’t change if those in power — mayors, police commissioners, city council members — don’t address the problem boldly and urgently. Until then, it’s difficult to see how the public — particularly communities of color — can trust police to do their jobs, leaving “serve and protect” as nothing but a bitter punchline.