It is not a crime to belong to any radical organization. Nazi, skinhead, Black Panther, etc. Such people do not belong in the PUBLIC school system for obvious reasons. Private schools may hire anyone including convicted terrorists, criminals, radicals of all stripes etc. As to police officers, that would be up to each department. I wonder how black folk are represented in Fruitland Park, FL? Maybe like Ferguson the representation on the town council and PD leads to acceptance of people with kkk backround. But to be truthful, who would want to be a police officer in this climate of rampant racist police brutality ?
[quote=“phillyphil, post:2, topic:63802, full:true”]white supremacist terrorist organization founded in 1865 by a group of DEMOCRAT Confederate war vets[/quote]Nice edit. I take it you’re not familiar with American history, or you’d be aware of the fact that at the time the Democrats and Republicans were politically the reverse of the modern-day parties. Also, the Democrats were pro-slavery from the 1850s through the Civil War, and the Republican party actually formed on an anti-slavery platform.
I see someone already pointed out how silly/ill-informed adding democrat was.
The racist in question was hired at a public school
Each private police department? Not a lot of those comparatively though one is too many.
Besides, if actual police that means LEO, registered peace officer etc and as such are always to an extent public at the individual level.
??
A violent racist would.
Note that the Democrats and Republicans essentially swapped racial policies in the last 50 years. The Republican Party was founded by abolitionists, and the Democratic Party in opposition was solidly in favor of slavery/segregation up through the mid-20th century, when the civil rights movement first began to gain real traction. When Democratic president Lyndon Johnson oversaw the passage of the Civil Rights Act in 1964, he told an aide “I think we just delivered the South to the Republican Party for a long time to come,”* and indeed Republican leaders were quick to formulate the Southern Strategy, wooing freshly-alienated racists to vote Republican for a change.
*The more commonly quoted version “We have lost the South for a generation” appears to be a corruption of the original, and a dramatic underestimate besides.
And if there was every any doubt of that just look at which politicians went out of their way to defend the Confederate flag over the last couple of months.
Still, I guess it never hurts to remind people just in case they ever step through a rift in space/time and find themselves in a 19th-Century voting booth.
…who are bitter over losing the War of Northern Aggression…
Off-topic somewhat, but reading this reminded me of a line Gawker adopted during the recent brouhaha over South Carolina flying the old CSA battle standard: The War of Northern Progression.
Seems like a good update/usurption to/of that hoary old epithet. (Coined by Caity Weaver, IIRC)
All right, enough feeding the trolley.
Came to say I think Xeni’s “bottom line” makes sense, until you think about it. Do we want to live in a world of background checks so thorough there are never any false negatives? Remember that fewer false negatives almost always means more false positives.
In Florida, you can be an active duty police officer… while also being an active member…
No. No you can’t. The guys were fired. It would make a lot more sense to say, in Florida, sometimes racists can slip through the background check. But it’s not considered acceptable, at least not among the powers that be, and that’s a hell of a lot of progress since 1970.
The informant was the guy who recruited them into the clan…
James Elkins was a KKK Kleagle (recruiter).
I always find it really strange when Floridians identify as Southern when it’s really its own weird thing. Okay, maybe Jacksonville and Tallahasee, being still part of the mainland, but this is down by Orlando and Tampa. It feels nothing like being in the South there (other than the humidity and heat) . You get to Miami and it’s like another country entirely.
You guys aren’t South. You’re Post-South. America’s Crazy Penis.
OK, he had ties to the KKK while being a cop. You don’t want that. He was fired. At what point does he get to work again? Regardless of his possible anti-social and anti-human beliefs he has to work because he has to eat. If he can’t get a job here I guess he’ll have to leave the country. Has anyone asked him if he has changed his mind on things? At the very least could he be able to hold a job and conduct himself professionally regardless of what is going on in his head?
No matter what the crime or fault people have to begin again and live their lives.
I think WalMart’s hiring.
Yup! It’s a wonderful world we live in!
He’s done well to keep his eye holes lined up.
The girlfriend is from there. She affectionately refers to it as “North Cuba.”
Sure, away from the public who may contain one or more people his preferred social group appears to hate.
Actually it says “Borst resigned from the department and Hunnewell was fired.”
So even if a normal background check was done, how would the school have known? It would have just said he was a former police officer. Even if someone had called his former employer, I believe that the only thing they could have legally said was that he was not eligible for rehire. I agree that there has to be limit on what information you should get on a background check for a job. Just as there are questions that are illegal to ask in an interview, or that an employer can say about a former employee, why would a background check be any different?
It’s a fair question. I think that at the very least, it is reasonable to block avowed bigots from positions of real power over members of the public. Cop and teacher are both positions that have such power; he shouldn’t be either of those things.
Regarding changing his mind, he’s currently denying that he was ever with the KKK, although a state attorney says the FBI report contained “a lot of fairly substantial evidence that tends to support” his membership.
