Officer tells woman in traffic stop: ‘Remember, we only shoot black people’

ATLANTA — A white Cobb County police lieutenant has been moved to administrative duty for telling a white woman during a traffic stop, “Remember, we only shoot black people.”

The Cobb branch of the NAACP said Thursday the officer’s statements, captured on police video footage, were disturbing, but the branch president said she wanted to know more about the incident.

Channel 2 Action News reported that its request for body camera footage of the traffic stop prompted an internal investigation of Lt. Greg Abbott, who has been on the Cobb force for 28 years.

The footage shows the officer speaking through the car window to a female passenger in a vehicle that had been stopped for suspected DUI.

The woman tells Abbott that she is afraid to reach for her cellphone because “I’ve just seen way too many videos of cops — “

At that point, Abbott cuts her off.

“But you’re not black. Remember, we only shoot black people,” the police veteran of nearly three decades can be heard saying. “Yeah. We only kill black people, right? All the videos you’ve seen, have you seen the black people get killed?”

The footage is from July 2016, before Mike Register took over as chief of Cobb police.

He said that Abbott will remain on administrative duty pending the outcome of the investigation, for which he didn’t give a timeline.

Suri Chadha Jimenez, an Atlanta attorney who represented the man charged with DUI in the case in July 2016, said he thinks the officer was being sarcastic after the woman “gave him some lip.”

“It makes you cringe when you hear it. It’s unacceptable,” Jimenez said.