Popular YouTuber “Mike the Cop” said he has quit his job on the police force after the Atlanta officer who fatally shot Rayshard Brooks was charged with felony murder.
Mike, who worked as a police officer in metro Detroit, announced to his 425,000 subscribers on Friday that he had made “the difficult but necessary decision” to quit.
“Seeing that officers who simply did their job and did what they were trained to do could be literally railroaded without due process, thrown under the bus by their department, by their city. All of that stuff made me realize that now I’m not just being asked to sacrifice my life, and my family is not just being asked to sacrifice my life, potentially,” he said, adding, “Now, I am being asked to sacrifice the financial future and well-being of my family, in case I was thrown under the bus, or criminally charged, or ended up, you know, getting sold up the river for simply doing my job.”
“So while my family has been and I have been OK with putting my life on the line. I am not OK with the reverse of me putting all of them on the line and risking everything that we built as a family to get tossed away simply because of a political motivation of somebody that I have nothing to do with,” he added.
Mike, who joined law enforcement in 2009, called the Fulton County district attorney’s decision to charge the officers involved in the Brooks shooting “unacceptable” and a “disgrace” in another video.
Paul Howard Jr. announced that officer Garrett Rolfe, who fired the shots that killed Brooks, would be charged with the felony murder, a charge that carries a possible death sentence, earlier this month. Devin Brosnan, the other officer at the scene, was charged with aggravated assault and is cooperating with the investigation.
