Presley Garcia, a University of South Florida police officer was dismissed from the department after officials learned about an old Twitter profile that described her as a “KKK member” in the account bio.
A local reporter from BayNews9 found the 26-year-old’s account, created in 2015, and notified authorities of the racist description in the bio. Garcia, who joined the department in 2018, has since been terminated.
Garcia admitted the account was hers but says a friend wrote the phrase, and that she did not know what it meant at that time. She would have been 21 around the time that the account was created, and claims she tried to delete it but was only able to uninstall the app from her phone. The account was last active in January 2016.
Police Chief Chris Daniel wrote a letter to human resources calling for Garcia to be terminated, citing concerns over potential backlash from the community.
“Since the incident involving George Floyd, dissident members of the community have targeted law enforcement officers, their departments, their families and their homes,” he said. He also predicted that demonstrations and protests might disrupt police operations if Garcia was not fired.
After being terminated, Garcia spoke to The Tampa Bay Times saying, “There’s all the talk of ‘Back the Blue,’ but not one person had my back. I feel helpless and like I’m drowning. No one was willing to just listen to my story, and I feel like the university was just trying to cover their butts.”
An investigation that began in early July has confirmed Garcia’s statement about not being affiliated with the Ku Klux Klan.
When asked why the account was not discovered during a pre-employment interview, Garcia said she did not have a Twitter account because she thought it had been deleted. A review of Garcia’s “self-initiated police activities,” did not indicate patterns of racial discrimination: 46 percent of the people she made contact with were white, 17.11 percent were Hispanic and 14.4 percent were Black. Roughly 10 percent of the students at the Tampa-area university are Black.
“It’s very hurtful that something from a long time ago that I didn’t even do has completely destroyed my career,” she said. “There’s no way I’d ever be a part of that group. I wasn’t raised that way.”
Garcia has 30 days to file a grievance with the West Central Florida Police Benevolent Association or with the university, but says she is unlikely to do so after feeling like she was not heard during the investigation.
