Sergeant Silvia Browning Cotriss, a 20-year member of the police, devoted her life to protecting the inhabitants of Atlanta, Georgia. Normally, her work included apprehending criminals and making her town a safer place for law-abiding citizens. Regrettably, she was caught up in the middle of an inquiry.
Roswell Police investigators alerted Cotriss that she was being investigated for unbecoming officer behavior after a citizen made a formal complaint over her yard display. The obnoxious display in issue—a Confederate flag flying directly underneath her American flag.
Lee Jenkins, the pastor of Eagle Nest Church, was the aggrieved party. However, Jenkins has turned his church into a forum for political action, urging parishioners to join the neo-Marxist movement Black Lives Matter and advocate for “racial justice.” He even has a lecture titled “When they go low, we go high,” which is a play on Michelle Obama’s famous tagline. He also led a march in Roswell with the BLM.
Jenkins wasn’t ready to let Cotriss get away with flying an inflammatory flag on her private property. As a result, he informed Roswell Police Chief Rusty Grant, who initiated the internal inquiry. Cotriss was dismissed four days later, yet she claims that she has never regarded the flag as a sign of hatred.
Cotriss says she had no idea the flag had become such a source of disagreement throughout the country. She said that she does not watch the news since “we live it in the day and don’t want to see it again at night.” It’s about her southern roots and the fact that her late spouse gave her the flag.
Jenkins praised the chief for firing Cotriss after 20 years of service. The preacher said that all he wants is “conversation” and for people to listen to one another. When he reported Cotriss for wrongdoing, he did not give her such a talk.
Despite her dismissal, Cotriss’ primary purpose is to continue helping her community. Setting her complaint aside, she said that she would want to meet with the pastor and his largely black congregation in order to restore the relationship with police enforcement.
They are so motivated to defend their victim mindset that they look for racists at every turn. When they cannot discover true proof of racism, they fabricate it. Cotriss is unlikely to be racist, and her neighborhood would benefit from her removal from the force. Rather than engaging in a “conversation,” as Jenkins says, to comprehend why each of them had a different perspective on the flag, he tried to penalize the dissenter. Sadly for Pastor Jenkins, he needs to buttress his freedom warrior character, and Cotriss was nothing more than a sacrificial goat to pad his activism.
