As my colleague Nicole Narea noted last night, Pence breezily dismissed the concepts of “implicit bias” in America’s police forces during his debate with Senator Tim Kaine.
But he may want to familiarize himself with the sheriff’s department in McIntosh County, Georgia. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reports that the department just fired one deputy for using racist epithets on social media; another deputy resigned after being implicated in the same scandal. And there’s evidence they did more than joke around, according to the Southern Center for Human Rights’s Sarah Geraghty:
“This case goes deeper than two officers caught using racist language on their personal social media pages,” Geraghty said. “The messages reference an explicit intent by these law enforcement officials to ‘get’ black motorists. Our investigation to date suggests that this may be the tip of the iceberg.”
Maybe that will surprise Pence. But it won’t surprise black Americans, who undeniably suffer disproportionate rates of violence and surveillance at the hands of the nation’s cops.