Photo: Moment RF
A white jail employee has been suspended after a viral video showed him holding a bat labeled with a racial slur, per The Root.
Brian Davis, an employee at the Allegheny County Jail (ACJ) in Pittsburgh since 2018, was caught in a now-deleted video wearing a Patriots sweatshirt and holding a baseball bat wrapped in barbed wire. The words "n****r beater" were etched on the bat, sparking outrage from the public.
“I really, really am afraid to think of if that bat has been used before,” Tanisha Long, an organizer with the Abolitionist Law Center, said in a statement. “He needs to go. He needs to do some soul-searching and figure out what it is about Black people that he does not like. But I also think we need to talk to every single person in that jail who has had an encounter with him.”
Black inmates make up roughly 67 percent of ACJ’s population.
In wake of the incident, ACJ said in a statement: “The ACJ administration, from Warden Wingard down, expects professionalism from all jail employees. The jail does not tolerate racist or abusive language or behavior. The employee in question has been suspended, and we are investigating the situation.”
At-large Allegheny County Council Member Bethany Hallam called the video “disappointing.”
“To know that this person was responsible for keeping them safe in that facility, and he had these horrible and disgusting views, it’s disappointing to me,” she said. “I’m happy that it got out there, that we now know how he’s been thinking this whole time.”
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