A group of five police officers in Palo Alto, California are suing the city after it allowed far-left radicals to create a pro-Black Lives Matter mural in one of the city’s main streets, according to ABC News.
The mural was painted last June following the death of George Floyd, a career criminal who fatally overdosed on fentanyl while in police custody in Minneapolis last May. His death sparked nationwide race riots, as well as a wave of anti-police sentiment, including a rise in attacks on police officers and calls from far-left politicians to defund police departments.
Among the most controversial images in the Palo Alto mural, painted across the street from City Hall, is a depiction of Joanne Chesimard, a black nationalist who murdered a New Jersey state trooper in 1973. Chesimard, who goes by the name Assata Shakur, fled the country and has been staying in Cuba ever since, where she continues to be venerated by modern black nationalists.
Also depicted in the mural is the logo of the New Black Panthers, an extreme black nationalist group that is so radical that even the far-left Southern Poverty Law Center has acknowledged it as a hate group.
The lawsuit says that “law enforcement officers, including Plaintiffs, were forced to physically pass and confront the mural and its offensive, discriminatory, and harassing iconography every time they entered the Palo Alto Police Department.” The suit then goes on to say that although the officers had previously taken their complaints to city officials, the city “ratified the conduct and insisted that [the mural] remain and persist.”
The mural was so controversial that the National Police Association issued a statement in June of 2020 demanding the mural’s removal, calling it an “atrocity.”