A police officer in Richmond, Virginia, who was caught on video threatening Black middle-school children has been put under disciplinary action by the department. Now, a mother of one of the students is advocating for the officer not to lose his job.
On Sunday, Cameron Hilliard,13, shared a YouTube video of the incident, which reportedly took place last Friday outside of Albert Hill Middle School. As a cop car drives by, kids from behind the camera are heard laughing. The officer inside the car, whose face is not visible in the video clip, is heard saying, “Wait till your asses turn 18. Then you’re mine.”
While it’s generally unacceptable for a police officer to display such attitudes toward children, it’s especially bone-chilling when aimed at Black children: Police brutality that disproportionately affects the Black community.
“When I first saw this video, I kind of brushed the whole situation off,” Keisha Curry, Hilliard’s mother, says in the YouTube video, which has clips from the incident as well as her commentary. She added that once she watched the video, she was disturbed.
“For her to come out of her school and feel threatened,” she said, “you can call it a form of bullying.”
However, later in a comment that appears to be written by Curry under Hilliard’s name, she said she wanted this to be a learning lesson for the officer, but not the termination of his job. “He was wrong on many levels but no ones perfect, neither am I or Cameron,” the comment reads. “He and the kids can learn from this if we stop pointing fingers and judging people we dont know. Thats why I reccomended a investigation and reprimand not for him to be fired [sic throughout].”
The Richmond Police Department on Thursday shared on a Facebook post that the officer “will be disciplined and will be sent for mandatory remedial training.” The post also said the officer has been removed from the neighborhood in a move “unrelated to his discipline.”
“I’m not acting in anger but I wanna act in a way to spread the message—that we can be better,” Curry says in the video. “I just want a change from what I grew up with. That has a lot to do with why people have lost their lives [to] police shootings. I think it stems from the relationship that you have with fellow officers.”
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