A North Carolina police chief was forced to retire this week after posting a Facebook rant calling the Black Lives Matter movement “nothing more than an American born terrorist group” and blaming President Barack Obama for failing to “put a stop” to the movement.
Surf City, N.C., Police Chief Mike Halstead was asked to resign or be fired, effective immediately, during a Tuesday emergency town meeting called by the mayor. The chief, who local news reports said had planned to retire in the coming year, decided to retire on the spot during the meeting Tuesday afternoon.
In his more than 600-word diatribe full of misspellings posted on his personal Facebook page earlier this month as an “Open Letter from a Police Chief,” Halstead said Black Lives Matter was “a terrorist group brought on by the lie of the hands up don’t shoot during the criminal thug Michael Brown incident.” (The impetus for Black Lives Matter was actually the 2013 acquittal of George Zimmerman in the shooting death of Black teenager Trayvon Martin, according to the movement’s founders.)
