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A police department in Western Georgia is under investigation after posting a video clip and multiple photos on its social media page of white people using images of a Black man as target practice, and the department’s police chief is, apparently, taking an “I don’t see color” approach to defending the racist photos.
According to WSB-TV 2, Villa Rica Mayor Gil McDougal ordered the investigation after ordering the police department to remove the images from all its platforms, but because the internet never forgets, screenshots of the photos can still be found all over Twitter.
NBC News reported that the photos were taken during a firearms safety class for civilians that took place last Saturday in Villa Rica, which is about 33 miles west of Atlanta.
“It was immediately clear to me that the selection of these images during training was offensive,” McDougal said in a statement. But for Police Chief Michael Mansour, the problematicness and outright racism of those images weren’t so clear—or at least that’s what he claims.
“The perception of it looks like we have people just shooting at black guys and that’s not at all what it was,” Mansour, who admitted to posting the images himself, told WSB-TV.
Mansour claimed that earlier on the day of the event, people were using images of a white man for target practice.
“They ran out of those targets at the range and they put these targets up,” he said in reference to the poster that featured the Black man wearing a beanie and pointing a gun. McDougal challenged that claim saying someone—ANYONE—at the police department should have had the common sense to understand that only posting images of the Black man target being shot at by white people was going to cause a significant problem
“Seems like you could see right from the moment you put these pictures up that there was going to be a question,” McDougal said, to which Mansour responded, “We did not notice that because we don’t look at that. Therefore, it was just a mistake.”
So, basically, we’re supposed to believe that targets that featured a white man were also used, but the only visuals the department chose to post online were that of the Black man. And the photos show as many as four targets with the same image of the Black man were up all at once, which might lead one to ask why those posters were grouped together instead of mixed in with the white targets if this was, indeed, an unintentional colorblind offense.
Still, Mansour insists that it was just a mistake, which, to be fair, is more than cops tend to admit after killing an actual Black man.
“It’s just an innocent mistake, but it was a mistake,” Mansour told NBC. “And I’m very transparent in saying that we messed up. But at no time will I accept people telling me I’m a racist, or our department is a racist because we made a mistake.”
If you say so, chief. If you say so.
