DENVER — The Colorado Fraternal Order of Police had some choice words — including “race baiting morons” and “delusional fools” — for those who say the suspected Colorado Springs gunman wasn’t killed by police because he was white.
The Colorado FOP issued a blistering statement over the weekend after a rash of social-media posts citing the Colorado Springs rampage as proof that police are more likely to shoot black suspects than white ones.
“Sadly there are race baiting delusional ignorant fools with an agenda of hate that use any tragic event to peddle their corrupted opinion,” said the statement. “What they don’t understand is our job is to preserve life not take it. You see for us all lives matter. That is the primary reason we join this profession. The standard we live by.”
The union’s statement, which made the rounds on social media after being posted on the Colorado FOP Facebook page, also said that the suspect, 57-year-old Robert Lewis Dear Jr., was “given the opportunity to surrender.”
“The choice to live or die was his. He chose to live, laid down his weapon, complied with all commands and peacefully surrendered,” said the Colorado FOP.
Dear was arrested in connection with the Friday rampage at the Planned Parenthood clinic in Colorado Springs, which left three dead and nine injured, prompting comparisons to recent incidents in which black suspects were shot and killed by police.
“The Planned Parenthood shooter is peacefully detained after shooting 5 officers. We’ve been killed for far less,” said Deray McKesson, a leader of the Black Lives Matter movement, in a Friday post on Twitter, using the hashtag #whiteterrorism.
Said Christopher Chavez Sr. on Facebook: “Too bad he wasn’t a person of color or else he would be dead.”
In its statement, the Colorado FOP said that, “What the race baiting morons who believe that he was spared because he was White fail to acknowledge is that just this year alone there have been numerous shootings of police officers where the suspects were taken into custody.”
“Many of those suspects were persons of color. They were not executed. They were taken into custody,” the statement said.
ThinkProgress’s Carimah Townes pointed to recent examples of police arresting white mass-murder suspects, such as Dylann Roof, who has been charged with shooting and killing nine parishioners in June at the Emanuel A.M.E. Church in Charleston, South Carolina.
“In stark contrast, unarmed black people have been killed by police on the spot. Others who have had less threatening weapons in their possession have also been killed without due process,” she said in a Sunday post.
The Colorado FOP has since changed its privacy settings so that the statement is no longer accessible on Facebook, although it has been reposted on numerous websites, including ColorLines and Bearing Arms.
• Valerie Richardson can be reached at vrichardson@washingtontimes.com.
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