Three police officers from the Wilmington, North Carolina police department have been fired after a video showed one of them making racist remarks. The Charlotte Observer reports that Cpl. Jessie Moore and officers Kevin Piner and Brian Gilmore were fired on Tuesday. All three have been accused of violating the department's standards of conduct, using both inappropriate jokes and hateful slurs.
"When I first learned of these conversations, I was shocked, saddened and disgusted," said Police Chief Donny Williams on Wednesday. "There is no place for this behavior in our agency or our city and it will not be tolerated."
The police department conducted a video audit, and footage from Piner's car saw him and Moore make "extremely racist" comments, as the sergeant behind the video audit revealed.
During the video, Piner criticized the police department and said that officers were too busy "kneeling down with the black folks." Later on during the extensive video, Cpl. Moore phoned Piner and allegedly referred to a Black woman on the force as "a negro." He later went on to refer to her by another racial slur, followed by a homophobic slur. The comments only got worse, and Piner later said he believed a civil war is bound to happen.
"We are just going to go out and start slaughtering them," he said in the clip, after explaining he was looking to buy a new firearm. "I can't wait. God, I can't wait."
Moore said he isn't onboard with that line of thinking and called Piner "zrazy," but Piner doubled down on his thoughts. He added that a civil war would be necessary to "wipe them off the fucking map," the police report claims. "That'll put them back about four or five generations."
The officers involved admitted that it was their voices in the clip, but they also denied they were racist. They allegedly claimed their comments were the result of stress following the death of George Floyd, who died in Minneapolis last month when officer Derek Chauvin kept his knee on Floyd's neck for over eight minutes. As a result of the termination of the officers' jobs, cases involving the three of them will be reviewed by the district attorney's office.
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