HAMILTON. Ga. — New video has surfaced showing more of a racist rant between a Georgia police chief and officer that has gotten national attention.
The nation heard two Hamilton, Ga. police officers throw around the N-word, fantasize about slavery and make lewd remarks about preferred sexual contact with Black women.
Channel 2 investigative reporter Nicole Carr was in Harris County, where the patrolman’s face is visible for the first time on a new, extended video. The video also shows officer John Brooks say he’s counting on armed white people to handle protesters.
Brooks and former police chief Gene Allmond are both out of a job. Allmond resigned immediately and Brooks was fired when he didn’t immediately return police equipment. This was after body cam surfaced last week, showing a recording of their summer conversation.
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Ahead of a Black Lives Matter protest in Hamilton, Allmond and Brooks said the fatal police shooting of Rayshard Brooks was justified.
“Then how come when you tase a f---ing n-----, It’s like you done killed him 27 times?” Brooks said.
Brooks makes lewd sexual comments about Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms and Stacey Abrams.
The men also reasoned that slavery is something in which Black people should be grateful.
“For the most part, it seems to me like they furnished them a house to live in,” Allmod said in the video. “They furnished them clothes to put on their back. They furnished them food to put on their table, and all they had to do was f---ing work.”
“And now we give them all those things and they don’t have to f--ing work,” Brooks responds.
In the new video, Brooks is visible for the first time, and a conversation between his wife and him is picked up on camera. Brooks gives his wife an update on the protesters, thinking his body camera is not working.
He implies that armed, white people will “handle” the protesters, telling his wife that he confirmed their presence at the march with his “lodge brother.”
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“We got our body cam on. We don’t think they work or not, but if nothing else, it’ll give them somethin’ to think about,” Brooks said. “I’m guessing that if they try to tear something down, that the white folks with the guns will step in. And you know what? I’ll just let them take care of it. And then if I have to arrest somebody for going too far, I’ll do it.”
The incident brought a member of the mayor’s office to tears.
“I mean, honestly, this is one time when I’m speechless. There are no words to describe what I felt looking at the video with a friend of mine who is Black,” said Buddy Walker, the mayor’s assistant who was among the first to view the video .
Walker said he was with city leaders who were examining the body cameras last Monday, because Brooks indicated they didn’t work. That was after he was asked over the summer why the police department doesn’t use fairly new purchases.
On Monday, those city leaders discovered a memory card was full on Brooks’ camera, and they viewed the first few minutes of the racist conversation before calling a city meeting.
Within a few hours, both men were given the option to resign in lieu of termination, but Walker said the city is not paying out any benefits, including healthcare and pension.
He added that Brooks had put in for MLK Holiday pay that the city did not honor.
Neither of the men nor their family members would open their door when Carr went by their houses Monday.
Carr asked the city attorney if the municipality will review arrests or cases involving the two officers, but they said they had not received any other complaints at this point.
“Certainly not to our knowledge,”city attorney Ron Iddins said. “We never had any prior indication that the officers behaved in a manner that would be discriminatory. Now, of course, the thing is we’re a very small town….We only have a couple thousand population, so this is not a high-crime area and this is not a place where a lot of arrests are made.”
Iddins said that the city believes its recovered all of the weapons, badges and other uniform detail that each officer had in his possession.
He called the ordeal “unexpected and unpleasant.”
Leaders and officers in the small city will undergo racial sensitivity training, but say citizens should know they have no tolerance for what happened.
“We have not been presented with this problem in the past ,” Iddins said. “The important thing to know about what did happen is that this city did not try to suppress it . They did not try to cover it up, and they took immediate action”
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