Initially placed on administrative leave for posting a comment on social media that appeared to support violence against people who voted for president-elect Joe Biden, an Alabama police captain recently resigned from office.
On Thursday, Flomaton Police Chief Charles Thompson issued the following statement: “On November 5th, 2020 the Flomaton Police Department Social Media Platform began accruing multiple complaints in regards to a comment posted by a Flomaton Police Officer. Also, various emails and phone calls have been received by my office. Due to today’s high call volume of complaints, call back has been extremely hard to conduct, I plan to contact all callers back.
“Copies of the comments and complaints have been acquired and retained for Internal Investigations. The outcome of the internal investigation is pending at the time and date of this Press Release.”
On his personal Facebook account, Flomaton Police Captain Scott Walden responded to a post from someone who wrote, “The idiots that voted for Biden hated Trump enough to throw the country away. Thank the lying liberals and democrats news media.”
In response, Walden posted: “they need to line up ev1 of them and put a bullet in their skull for treason.”
In a separate post, Walden later defended his words by writing, “Well apparently someone, and I know who you are as well as the others jumping on the “ gonna get them fired “ train is circulating a comment I made about TREASON. The comment even says TREASON but someone has run rampant saying I was meaning liberal n Democrats. Well #1 I don’t care who you vote for, #2 the comment was about treason and what should happen to the ones who are charged for committing treason . So either you trying to stir the pot or you are ok with someone committing treason but not ok with someone who says they should be shot. This is the world we live in.”
Flomaton Mayor Dewey Bondurant reportedly wanted to fire to Walden when he learned about the incident. According to Bondurant, Walden had been warned before for making similar comments.
“That’s what I wanted to do to start with, but by law I can’t. So I handled it by law. We put him on administrative leave, paid leave, but we took his gun and his shield,” Bondurant told reporters on Thursday.
The next day, Bondurant confirmed that Walden submitted his resignation amid public outcries for his termination from office. The original post on Walden’s Facebook page has been removed.
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