A police commissioner in a New Hampshire town has faced demands for his resignation after word got out that he’d called President Obama the N-word. Incredibly, he has let it be known that he won’t apologize for using the slur.
Robert “Bob” Copeland, an 82-year-old retired lawyer, is one of three members of the police commission in Wolfeboro, a resort town of 6,300 people in the Lakes Region of central New Hampshire, roughly an hour north of Manchester. He and his two colleagues are responsible for hiring and firing officers, disciplining them and setting their salaries. He largely stayed out of the spotlight until March, when Wolfeboro resident Jane O’Toole revealed she heard him loudly call Obama “that f***ng n****r” in a local restaurant.
An outraged O’Toole promptly complained to town manager David Owen, who shared it with the board of selectmen; Wolfeboro, like most other New England towns, is governed by a town meeting that appoints selectmen to handle day-to-day affairs between yearly meetings. A few days later, the selectmen told O’Toole that while they found Copeland’s comments outrageous, they had no power to discipline him since he was an elected official. Shortly afterward, Copeland sent a breathtakingly frank email to his fellow commissioners in which he said, “I believe I did use the ‘N’ word in reference to the current occupant of the Whitehouse. For this I do not apologize–he meets and exceeds my criteria for such.” He then sent an email to O’Toole which not only included the email he’d sent to his colleagues, but invited her to speak at the commission’s regular business meeting in May. O’Toole not only took him up on that offer, but wrote a scathing letter to Wolfeboro’s weekly newspaper, the Granite State News. In O’Toole’s view, while Copeland has the right to express such ignorant views under the First Amendment, she found it “abhorrent” that an elected official could express them so loudly. She was also very troubled that the other commissioners “accepted” his response. Read it on Facebook.
At yesterday’s police commission meeting, speaker after speaker blasted Copeland’s remarks and echoed O’Toole’s demand that he resign, with one threatening to have him recalled if he didn’t step down. Copeland remained silent, even when one speaker asked him what he meant by those comments. He did, however, have plenty to say after the meeting. WMUR-TV in Manchester caught up with Copeland as he was being questioned by several other residents. After telling a resident that he “made no bone about” his comments, he turned his ire on WMUR reporter Nick Spinetto, calling him a “nosy individual” and a “skunk.”
In an interview with the New Hampshire Union Leader, Copeland said–presumably with a straight face–that he isn’t a racist. He said that he served alongside blacks in the Navy and the Green Berets, and also worked with them at a Ford plant in Detroit and a New Jersey loading platform. At the last job, he said he was the only white on his team.
The police commission plans to decide how to handle the situation, but isn’t letting on publicly about what that next step will be. One can only hope, though, that Copeland decides to go while he can still do so with some semblance of decency. According to WMUR, there are only 20 blacks in the town. But regardless of how many blacks there are in an area, racism of any sort–and especially the loud-and-proud racism espoused by Copeland–is not acceptable from anyone, anytime, anywhere.
Edited/Published by: SB
Darrell Lucus is a radical lefty Jesus-lover who has been blogging for change for a decade. Follow him on Twitter @DarrellLucus or connect with him on Facebook.
