A retired Los Angeles police detective is having all of his cases reviewed after a viral video caught him shouting racial slurs at a Black man following a traffic incident.
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Footage that’s been circulating over the past few days shows two cars parked along the side of the road in Valencia, California, with their respective drivers yelling at one another on the sidewalk.
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The recording begins in the middle of the altercation, but the man later identified as John Motto can be immediately be heard demanding of the other man: “Oh, so you can say [the N-word] but I can’t?”
“Are you f—king serious right now?” the other driver asks.
A woman who appears to have been with Motto tries to keep them separate, as another bystander can be heard telling the Black man to “just walk away.”
He does, and Motto continues to taunt him.
“Go back in your little cage, until the monkey controller gets here,” Motto tells him.
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At one point, Motto turns to the person recording from a distance and says that the other man “started the [N-word] thing because he is the dumb [N-word].”
It didn’t take long for Motto to be identified, and for his history working for the LAPD to be uncovered. He worked as a homicide detective until May of last year and played a role in hundreds of cases.
An internal investigation has been launched and the Los Angeles District Attorney’s office has announced that it will be reviewing 370 cases that Mott was involved with, presumably to reassess whether racial bias played a role in any of the work Mott did as a detective.
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While the LAPD insists that Motto’s behavior “is not reflective of the thousands of hard-working and dedicated men and women of the Los Angeles Police Department,” no one believes them.
You employed that white supremacist John Motto for 30 years. You knew about his white supremacist mindset. https://t.co/izKC5WIQ7i
— Tariq Nasheed
(@tariqnasheed) March 17, 2021
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I’m sure nothin about LAPD changed after he retired.
— Sheela
(@TucciPlease) March 17, 2021
And while some have, predictably, attempted to defend Motto by pointing out we don’t see the beginning of the altercation on the video, the reality is that there’s no excuse for shouting out the N-word and other racial insults, and a man who’s so comfortable jumping right to that when he’s angry has most likely spent plenty of time saying those things when he’s not.
*First Published: March 18, 2021, 7:03 am
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