NYC Teachers Wear Shirts to Support Cops After Cop Murders Black Man

By Erin Gloria Ryan  |  September 5, 2014 | 3:30pm

So hot right now: white people showing support for white cops who kill unarmed black people. The latest group to hop on this bandwagon is New York City public school teachers who, after expressly being told to refrain from wearing pro-cop shirts to the first days of school, are going to go ahead ahead and keep wearing NYPD shirts, anyway.

The teachers’ “protest,” according to DNAInfo, comes on the heels of an anti-police brutality rally presided over by Al Sharpton. Sharpton, like most people who agree that death is an inappropriate punishment for suspicion of selling loosie cigarettes, thought that the death of Eric Garner in the hands of New York City police officers was kind of fucking terrible, and that maybe cops should be less murdery toward unarmed black people. Some teachers disagreed with the union’s support, swarming to pro-cop Facebook groups like Thank You NYPD.

Eager to #NOTALLCOPS a terrible tragedy, the educators in Staten Island and Queens “showed their support” for the NYPD by wearing NYPD shirts to work this week and posting images of them to the aforementioned Facebook group.

Critics of the teachers’ protest pointed out that a teacher wearing a pro-police shirt to a classroom full of public school children might send kids who had been victimized or seen victimization by police the message that what teachers really mean by the shirts is fuck you. And so, on Wednesday night, teachers at schools where the protest had gotten legs were told by a union rep via email that teachers should aim to wear neutral clothing that doesn’t support one political side or another, and that continuing to wear the NYPD shirts to work could result in punishment for the teachers.

Whether or not you believe that teachers protesting on behalf of another group of people seems an odd hill to die on for a group of people who have plenty to protest on behalf of themselves, or that this whole protest is in incredibly poor taste, one thing is clear: every teacher who wore those ugly shirts to work is definitely, beyond a shadow of a doubt guilty of a fashion crime. We need Joan Rivers now more than ever.

Overall, 550 shirts reading “New York’s Brightest Support New York’s Finest” were ordered in the runup to the first week of school, and humanity continues to be puzzling and terrible.

Images via Facebook

 
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