A post Sunday on the Facebook page of a Missouri police union declared the one-year anniversary of the shooting of unarmed teenager Michael Brown to be “Darren Wilson Day,” after the police officer who killed him, according to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.
The post on the page of the Columbia Police Officers’ Association incited outrage in the college town, including among city officials. Protestors gathered Monday outside the police department, according to the newspaper.
The post said the shooting had nothing to do with race and referred to Wilson, who was a police officer in Ferguson, Missouri, as an “innocent, but persecuted, officer,” according to the Post-Dispatch. It also said Wilson was innocent because of “the fact that he was thoroughly investigated… and found he did NOTHING wrong,” according to the report.
The post was shared almost 60 times, according to an ABC affiliate.
During the Monday demonstration, Columbia’s city manager and the police chief locked arms with demonstrators, according to the TV station.
The union is a “trade organization that is not accountable to the City of Columbia,” Robert McDavid, the mayor of Columbia posted on Facebook.
The original post appeared to have been deleted by Monday afternoon. But the union put up another Facebook post.
