Harassing someone because of their ethnicity is wrong. A person’s DNA is not in their power, and, therefore, a person should be evaluated on their character, not their DNA. But, I guess if you’re a police officer in Chicago, you’re allowed to be racist.
It appears that detective Esteban Gomez, who would think would understand how wrong racism is as he is presumably Latino, decided to harass some teenagers coming out of a pawn shop. He said later that one of the teens was a suspect in a robbery, but that didn’t even come up in the harassment. Matt Agorist writes about the incident:
In the video, Gomez is seen screaming at one of the teens who asked what he did wrong. He then starts to yell and says, “Wanna be hard with me? Be hard with me, go ahead. Think you’re a tough guy?”
In an attempt to intimidate the teens, Gomez starts to walk away and then turns around and says, “Who’s got the weed on them?”
The group reacts to his comment and Gomez turns around once again as he’s walking away and says “Did someone say [expletive] off?”
The group responds and says, “no,” just as Gomez points at two of the teens and says “You and you.”
Here’s the thing: the teens offered no resistance, did not put up a physical struggle with the officer. When one of the teens asked the cop why he was harassing them, his response was, “Because you’re white!”
This is completely unacceptable. Racism in any shape, form, or fashion is wrong. But what makes this even more infuriating is that, when a parent of one of the teens filed a complaint with the police department, she was told that Gomez had been disciplined for “behavior unbecoming an officer.”
That’s some understated description of the behavior.
If these teens had been African-American and had been told that they were being harassed for being black, this officer would have lost his job (as he should), but Gomez gets some kind of unspecified “discipline” but gets to keep his job? That’s outrageous!
I can only speculate as to why Gomez kept his job, but that kind of behavior has no place in law enforcement. There should be outrage across Chicago over this situation just like there would be if the teens had been African-American. But, it turns out that only alternative media is covering this story.
So much for the mainstream media wanting to cover real news.
If you live in the Chicago area, I urge you to do what you can to put pressure on the Lake Villa Police Department to get this rot out of their midst. If law enforcement expect to be treated with respect, then they need to make sure that law enforcement officers are worthy of that respect.