Two Gretna cops have been fired after one posted a threatening comment on Facebook about New York Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and the other liked it.
The post by Charlie Rispoli reads “This vile idiot needs a round, and I don’t mean the kind she used to serve”.
“Alluding to a violent act to be conducted against a sitting US Congresswoman, a member of our government, we’re not going to tolerate that,” Gretna Police Chief Arthur Lawson.
Ocasio-Cortez is one of a group of freshman, minority women Democratic lawmakers whose were the target of a tweet from the president last week where he told them to “Go back to where they came from”.
Lawson says the officers were being trained on racial bias and social media when the posts were made, and he’d even recently reminded them of similar incidents in other departments.
“Those articles I picked up off of the news, I passed them onto the officer to try to make them aware, and with all of our efforts, something like this still occurs. It’s disturbing.”
The comment was a caption to a post he shared from a satirical website that claimed the Congresswoman wanted to cut soldiers’ pay. It’s not known whether he knew the story was satire.
Lawson says he does not believe Rispoli’s post was an actual threat he planned to carry out, but it was unacceptable none the less, and nothing something he can just take back.
“I think he just caught up in the heat of the moment and posted it. He actually said after he posted it he realized very quickly that he should not have done it, and took it down, but by then it was too late.
Rispoli had been on the force since 2005, and Angelo Varisco, who liked the post, had worked there for three years.
