Police Workers Punished for Racist Web Posts on West Indian Parade
By JOSEPH GOLDSTEIN, NY TIMES

Nearly 20 employees of the New York Police Department have faced discipline in connection with the posting of racist or derogatory comments on a Facebook page about revelers at the 2011 West Indian American Day Parade, a heavily policed annual celebration in Brooklyn on Labor Day weekend, a spokesman for the department said Wednesday.

The comments referred to “savages” and “animals,” and one poster wrote, “Let them kill each other.” The Facebook page, titled “No More West Indian Day Detail,” elicited comments from more than 150 people, many of whose names matched those of police officers.

After an article appeared in December in The New York Times about the online remarks, the police commissioner, Raymond W. Kelly, vowed to conduct an internal affairs investigation, saying that 20 offensive comments “were associated with names that match those of police officers.”

On Wednesday, the department’s chief spokesman, Paul J. Browne, said 17 people had since been disciplined; four of those are officers facing pending departmental trials on charges of “conduct prejudicial to the good order of the Police Department,” he said.

Mr. Browne said that seven had received the department’s lowest level of punishment, the equivalent of a reprimand. Six others received what is known as a command discipline — a punishment that sometimes entails a loss of up to 10 vacation days, although Mr. Browne said he was unaware what penalties were issued in these particular cases.

Mr. Browne said he did not know which Facebook comments in particular corresponded to each punishment.

The parade has been marred by violence. In 2011, the police tied three shootings to the parade, and seized 14 guns during the celebration the night before the parade, which is known as J’Ouvert.

Some of the comments on the Facebook page suggested that some police officers felt the event had turned too dangerous.

“Why is everyone calling this a parade,” one wrote. “It’s a scheduled riot.”

A Brooklyn city councilman, Jumaane D. Williams, who is of West Indian descent, said the punishments indicated that the Police Department had taken the comments seriously. But Mr. Williams, who was himself handcuffed during the parade last year as he walked in an area that the police had closed to the public, said he was concerned that the racist comments reflected the attitudes of a department that he said used discriminatory policing practices.

The associate legal director of the New York Civil Liberties Union, Christopher Dunn, said it was difficult to evaluate the punishments without knowing which Facebook comments in particular had prompted them.

“Like all public employees, police officers have a First Amendment right to speak freely in their personal lives, even if that speech is offensive,” Mr. Dunn said. “What they do not get to do is be racists in their work lives, and the Police Department can and should discipline officers who are guilty of that.