You Gotta Be Kidding Me: Epithet-Spouting Philly Cop Re-Instated
When Philadelphia Police Officer Bill Thrasher (pictured) was fired last year for spouting all kinds of racist garbage in a ridealong article for the Temple News, it seemed that all had ended well. Not so fast: Thrasher has been re-instated, after arbitrators basically ignored journalist Shannon McDonald‘s testimony. And in the offing, have aggressively tried to destory McDonald’s reputation (and by extension her livelihood, as she’s the editor/proprietor of NEastPhilly.com), all of this after she was harassed for months in the wake of the controversy over the Thrasher story. This kind of thing makes our blood boil, because the case has basically come to a close: The Philadelphia Police have decided they want their racist cop back. Great timing, too. Could McDonald or anyone else press the case further? To what end? Is it even worse? For the rest of us, it just means that the often disgusting natural order of Philadelphia has been restored, and there’s one more racist cop on the street. Now you know.
May 13th, 2010 at 12:36 pm
The gentleman pictured and described does sound like a complete bigoted tool. You must admit though, Thrasher is a pretty bad ass name.
May 13th, 2010 at 1:56 pm
funny, so the cops can say nigger, but the paper just had an article about all kinds of people getting arrested for calling cops assholes, fucking assholes, etc. Seems the tolerance for rude language among the oinksters only runs one way.
May 13th, 2010 at 2:06 pm
What a terrible joke. Nice reporting, and please follow up if there is something that can be done to voice appropriate outrage.
May 13th, 2010 at 2:36 pm
there’s this good news though, philly tough guys are becoming immune to tazing, amazing (hey that rhymes!)…I hope there is youtube footage of philly’s finest on Segue’s chasing this madman down, that would be cool…
http://www.philly.com/dailynews/local/20100513_News_flash__If_Taser_fails__try_beanbags.html
May 13th, 2010 at 4:32 pm
He’s smiling in the picture cause he has a black man in the trunk.
May 13th, 2010 at 5:20 pm
“Philadelphia Police have decided” means the union, not the Department. Someone needs to do an expose on the FOP ability to pretty much undo almost every high profile dismissal of officers by the administration through the arbitration system required in the police contract.
That will give people like Jonas something specific to advocate City Council look into instead of simply voicing outrage. Remember the beating video where a dozen or so police beat three people because they thought they were a cop killer? Almost if not all the officers dismissed in that instance are back on the job too through the same arbitration appeal process.
May 14th, 2010 at 1:32 am
Being a dumbshit aside, did Thrasher break the law or something? Are cops elected officials?
Quit it with the PC-nazi bullshit and let ol’ Thrasher go back to work with a giant target on his head.
May 14th, 2010 at 6:17 pm
Good point about the FOP. I doubt any city politician would be willing to take them on, which is a damn shame. Certainly someone could do quite a story on the workings of that arbitration process. I’d like to know more about that, but I’m sure it would just be depressing as hell.