He was caught on surveillance video (below) “leaving a ‘Ku Klux Klan’ note on a Black officer’s raincoat,” NBC News says (here).
That’s not all. He also “fashioned a KKK style hat out of paper” and told the officer “he had to wear it on his next call.”
There’s more. He pasted Officer Keith Pool’s face on a picture of the Grim Reaper, labeled it “the raccoon reaper,” and posted it on the bulletin board. He walked up to his patrol car and jived about “tinted windows.”
These are all racial dog-whistles, and all of it was racist harassment. Campo didn’t just harass the one (and later two) black officers his department hired against his will; he also had a habit of targeting black drivers by pulling over cars with tinted windows.
Anthony Campo (photo) is no longer police chief in Sheffield Lake, Ohio, a town of fewer than 10,000 people, mostly whites, on the shores of Lake Erie (profile here). When confronted by the mayor, he claimed it was all a joke. He was grinning, the mayor wasn’t — the town is going to be sued.
Campo, who’d been a Sheffield cop for 33 years, immediately retired from his $86,835-a-year job (a nice income in Sheffield), perhaps to preserve his pension benefits (story here).
Campo may well have been a good cop, and an effective police chief, in other respects. He claims he’s not a racist (now, why don’t we believe him)? But thanks to the national news coverage of his actions, that’s how he’s going to be remember: As a racist small-town police chief.
This is a story that has played out in countless communities across America countless times. The difference is they’re not always getting away with it anymore. That’s because the black victims of racial discrimination are suing and the municipalities that employ their tormenters are being held liable. The legal judgments can be large.
Small towns too often have served as refuges for bad cops, and small-town cops have a bad reputation (sometimes deserved, sometimes not). But they’re not immune from the winds of change. Those little cities and towns can’t afford to pay these legal judgments. Nowadays, it’s the rare mayor or city manager who hesitates to sack a racist police chief who engages in actionable acts of discrimination.
At least after they’re caught, and just before the lawsuits are filed.