A South Carolina sheriff’s office immediately fired one of its deputies for a racially offensive social media post pointing to Black people while he was on duty.
According to The Post and Courier, a Spartanburg County deputy was sitting in his patrol car when he took a photo of himself in a ski mask and captioned his social post with, “To find a YN, you must be a YN.”
“YN” is the abbreviated form of “young n****.”
Sheriff Bill Rhyne, the newly installed leader of the Spartanburg County Sheriff’s Office, stated that the deputy, who is white, published the post on Nov. 20. The next morning, he was fired, effectively ending his five-year tenure at the agency.
“That kind of stuff will absolutely not be tolerated under any circumstances at this agency under my leadership,” Rhyne said at a press conference, per WYFF. “What we do in uniform and the things and the choices that we make in uniform not only reflects on themselves, but it reflects on every man and woman that wears this uniform, not only here at the sheriff’s office, but across the entire state in the United States.”
Rhyne said the deputy violated policies that dictate that staff members must not behave in ways that discredit themselves or the sheriff’s office or post “ethnically derogatory material” on social media.
“This is not representative of what this agency wants to be, and this is not representative of what we want the people of Spartanburg County to think,” the sheriff added.
Rhyne did not say which platform the post was published on, and has not yet released the deputy’s identity to the public to give him time to tell family members before the news spreads.
“The reason for that is I want to be respectful to them,” Rhyne stated. “This is very fresh. This just happened. I want to make sure that I’m respectful enough to them, to give them time to notify family and other people prior to that.”
According to Rhyne, the Criminal Justice Academy will likely strip the deputy of his law enforcement certification.
