A couple of weeks ago, Sergeant Sylvia Cotriss was let go by the Roswell Police Department in Roswell, Georgia. The reason given was that she had been flying a Confederate flag out front on her yard for the past year. Cotriss was shocked and surprised.
In an interview with The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, former police sergeant Silvia Cotriss said she had been flying the battle flag below the American flag in front of her Woodstock house for more than a year with no complaints from neighbors or passersby. So she was surprised the week of July 11, when detectives with the department’s internal affairs division notified her that she was being investigated for conduct unbecoming an officer on or off duty.
“If I knew it offended someone, my friends, my family, I wouldn’t do it,” Cotriss told the AJC. “Police officers have to adjust a lot of things in our lives, and for 20 years my whole life has been about making change and being held to a higher standard. We take an oath to help and protect people, so we can’t have a private life that’s really bad.”
What seems to have happened was that a neighbor, driving his daughter to school, saw the flag and lodged a complaint with Roswell Police Chief Rusty Grant. Grant has been trying very hard to make overtures to the black community in his area and create trust within the communities that the Roswell police serve. According to Cotriss, she had originally had a Confederate flag with a biker emblem inside of it from a biker festival she had attended in May of last year, which she recently replaced with a bona fide, no bike, Confederate flag. When she was being investigated about the flag, Cotriss said some telling things.
Cotriss said when investigators told her about the complaint she removed the flag. On Tuesday, neither flag was flying outside her home. But during an interview with detectives, according to the investigative report, the detectives asked her “why she would have or allow the Confederate flag to be flown, especially in today’s environment.”
“Cotriss explained that the flag was part of her history, part of the South, part of history involving the Civil War. She denied having negative feelings regarding the flag,” according to the report.
And when the detectives told her that the flag had been a symbol used by Dylann Roof, who executed nine African-American church worshippers in Charleston, S.C., according to the report she said she was “not aware of its relation to the shooting.
This leads to two conclusions for me: 1) Cotriss is lying and is trying to backpedal in order to keep her job, 2) Cotriss is so out of touch as to be ill-equipped to be a police officer, since her powers of perception are so muddied.