One day after a person was shot near a rally downtown, a New Orleans detective has been stripped of his badge for alleged social media posts labeling protesters “animals” and saying he would run over them with his car or shoot them.
Although police said Thursday’s shooting was not related to the demonstration, the posts by NOPD homicide detective Sgt. Anthony Edenfield flew across the Internet Friday afternoon. Some of them were allegedly posted in May.
One Facebook post said Mr. Edenfield commented, “these idiots want to act like animals,” below a news story about a protestor run over in St. Louis during sometimes riotous demonstrations there in the aftermath of George Floyd’s death at the hands of former Minneapolis police officers.
“This s—t has moved on from being about George Floyd,” the comment read. “I am running them over, and shooting if lethal force were my only way out. The a-hole under that truck got what he deserved.”
In a statement, the NOPD said Mr. Edenfield would be performing no law enforcement duties while an internal investigation was underway.
“Superintendent Shuan Ferguson stands committed to holding officers accountable,” the statement read. “Accountability is key to maintaining public trust.”
Relations between law enforcement and protesters have been strained in myriad U.S. cities since Mr. Floyd’s death, which led to the arrest of four cops and charges of second degree murder filed against one, Derek Chauvin. In St. Louis, a retired police captain was killed while guarding a friend’s pawn shop from looters, and scores of officers have been injured in the line of duty from New York to Seattle.
In addition, social media has been suffused with videos showing interactions between police officers and citizens. Many of them show exemplary behavior from law enforcement officers; others what appears to be felonious attacks by them. In one widely publicized video, two Buffalo police officers push aside an elderly protester who accosts and bizarrely waves his cell phone over their protective gear and communications devices. The man fell, fracturing his skull, and those two officers have been suspended and arrested, punishment that then triggered the resignation of more than 50 Buffalo officers.
In New Orleans, where in the 1990s the police department saw two officers sentenced to death in state and federal courts and subsequently operated under a consent decree reached with the Justice Department, relations between the force and many residents have long been strained.
Mr. Edenfield is fully cooperating with the investigation, and the Police Association of New Orleans attorney Eric Hessler told The New Orleans Advocate, and “anticipate[s] the NOPD will dole out any punishment they feel is commensurate with his violations.”
In other posts, Mr. Edenfield allegedly insulted Nikole Hannah-Jones, a New York Times writer behind the paper’s “1619 Project,” that asserts the United States was launched as a racist enterprise. The project has been feted by the journalism establishment that awarded it a Pulitzer Prize, while Pulitzer Prize-winning historians from Ivy League institutions criticized it as shoddy history.
“Burn down her house,” Mr. Edenfield allegedly wrote. “Blow up her car and see if she still feels the same way.”
It was unclear Friday if Mr. Edenfield had been disciplined by the NOPD in the past. In 2016, the NOPD’s 7th District congratulated a Sgt. Anthony Edenfield for earning “a bachelors degree in criminal justice with honors,” from Upper Iowa University.
• James Varney can be reached at jvarney@washingtontimes.com.
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