This Cop should be Fired

From CNN:

Boston police officer Justin Barrett, who sent a mass e-mail referring to Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. as a "banana-eating jungle monkey" has apologized, saying he's not a racist.

I propose that this fellow should be fired. Not because he’s a racist. Well, OK, not just because he’s a racist. It’s clear that plenty of cops are racist (and plenty aren’t), and if we fired all the racist cops (or firefighters or bankers or whatever) we’d have a boatload of unemployed bigots running around. No, officer Barrett should be fired because he’s clearly too stupid to be trusted with the safety and security of the people of Boston or anywhere else. I do not trust somebody this dumb to carry a firearm, a taser, a can of mace or to blow up balloons and hand them to children at an amusement park. He MIGHT be qualified to so some form of extremely menial labor if closely supervised, but there’d need to be a trial period to confirm that.

Email is not a new medium. It was born in the 70s on ARPAnet, the precursor to today’s Internet. Other than adding the ability to process HTML code, to include things like formatting and pictures and links to cheap drugs from questionable suppliers, it hasn’t changed much. So there’s really no cogent excuse for anybody to send such a blatantly career-ending, incendiary email out to a broad list of recipients including the news media. It’s profoundly stupid. It calls this man’s intellect and judgment seriously into question. It makes me want him off of America’s streets and into a career of retrieving shopping cards from the Wal-Mart parking lot and pushing them back inside the store. To put it simply, office Barrett, there’s no credible excuse or explanation for the email you sent, short of “somebody hacked my account.” Which you weren’t smart enough to come up with right away and now it’s too late.