Baltimore police Lt. Victor Gearhart had been posting tweets from his personal Twitter profile calling Baltimore residents “unbathed parasites,” “thugs,” and “scum” for a while now. But nothing came of it until a 17-year-old wrote a blog post.
Lt. Gearhart has been reassigned from patrol to building security, and both the Baltimore Police Department and Fraternal Order of Police (of which Gearhart is vice president) have been quick to distance themselves from the online statements after 17-year-old Makayla Gilliam-Price collected some of his more vitriolic micro-missives in an article at Assatassyllabus.org.
Gilliam-Price said she was alerted to Gearhart’s tweets by former Baltimore cop and police reform advocate Michael A Wood Jr.
The Baltimore Sun reports that Gilliam-Price has called for Gearhart’s outright dismissal. In her article, however, Gilliam-Price noted that “the targeting of individuals has proven to be one of the more unproductive methods of fighting for justice.” More important in her view are “the systems that create and uphold the individual instances of oppression that we struggle against daily.”
For his part, Gearhart appears to be unfazed by the censure. He took to Twitter to attack Gilliam-Price’s upbringing:
@M_GilliamPrice U are 17yoa BLM Radical daughter of Convicted Murderer who killed Irv&Rose Bronstein1982 and executed in 1998 he was aCOWARD
— Victor Gearhart (@SDGhostRider) January 25, 2016
According to the City Paper, Gearhart has his facts wrong.
