Abusive Chicago Officer George Granias owned racist websites
A Chicago police officer’s skeletons are becoming public after a quick Google search revealed that he hosted a number of racially insensitive websites, according to the Daily Beast.
George Granias was the focus of a recently settled lawsuit against the Chicago Police Department connected to his beating of a handcuffed Black woman in 2013. While working on the case, the lawyers for the victim, Patasa Johnson, searched Granias’ name on Google and found websites with URL’s of varying degrees of disgust. On the lighter side, they found patquinnsucks.com, in reference to Illinois’ former governor, and on the darker side they found ni**adown.com and ni**aguns.com.
“We came across that URL and said what the hell is this?” Brendan Shiller, Johnson’s attorney, said. Though the website was blank when Shiller and his team found it through a simple search for Granias’ name, its presence in Google search results suggests Granias did more than buy the racist domain name: He actually launched a website, Shiller said.
“He made it live and accessible to the public,” Shiller said. “You can create a website, but Google wouldn’t know about it unless you make it live and accessible.”
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Granias apparently started the websites only three months after the day he attacked Johnson, which is even more concerning given his lengthy disciplinary record. While it’s highly rare for the department to sustain complaints against officers – only 800 of 17,700 were in four years – Granias is the focus of three of them. Yet, he is not only still on the police force, but has a leadership position as a sergeant.
When you look at what he did in this case, in conjunction with his disciplinary record, in conjunction with this bizarre hobby of buying racist and kind of pornographic domain names, this is not somebody who should be a sergeant in the police department,” said Shiller.
While the websites aren’t active, they exist and were created by someone who’s meant to protect and serve many of the same people he’s proven he doesn’t view in a positive light. Granias’ behavior is only an extension of the toxic culture that can be found in police departments across the country.