A Georgia police department is under investigation after images surfaced online of a civilian firearm safety class that showed them using a picture of a black man as target practice.
The Villa Rica police department conducted the event on Saturday (June 17) and posted photos of the event on their Facebook page.
In the photograph, participants are seen pointing their guns at targets bearing a life-size photo of a black man.
The man in the target is pointing a gun and wearing a hat. The Department would later remove the image from the Facebook page, but the post was screenshot and re-published on social media, where it received criticism.
On Wednesday (June 21), The Villa Rica Police Department addressed the backlash in another Facebook post, suggesting it wasn’t their “intention to be insensitive, inflammatory, or offensive” in training, apologizing to their “fellow citizens” for “any offense we may have caused.”
Michael Mansour, Villa Rica’s chief of police, highlighted that targets depicting Black men were used across the state for training, adding that the Department also used targets depicting individuals who were white and Asian during the class.
However, Mansour noted that the officer who posted the photos, someone he declined to identify, had posted pictures of only the used Black targets as a mistake.
Instead, Mansour insisted that it was “an innocent mistake,” and wouldn’t accept being called a racist or the assertion that the Department is racist.
Villa Rica Mayor Gil McDougal, who launched an investigation into the Department, described being “personally embarrassed” by the incident, adding that the photographs do “not reflect the values of this community.”
Nothing says open season on black men like the Villa Rica police department in GA having target practice on pictures of black men of course being portrayed as criminals. Not even hiding the racism anymore. pic.twitter.com/GyV7Bc9tkS
— Bobby B 🇯🇲🇺🇸 (@RudeBoyNYK) June 22, 2023
