The group 100 Blacks in Law Enforcement Who Care is protesting death threats made against New York City Councilmember Charles Barron on the NYPD Rant website earlier this week. They want to find out if NYPD officers were responsible for the threats and to have the officers fired if that's true. The NYPD says they are looking into the threat. But this is not the first time that an NYPD Rant'er has threatened Barron. In December of last year someone posting on NYPD Rant under the screen name "EA1025" urged that Barron be "shot on site" [sic].

EA1025, whose avatar or graphical identity on the website is a picture of TV's terrorist fighter Jack Bauer, wrote the following:

WHEN HE ARRIVES AT 1PP he should be shot on site. the man's actions should be considered terrorism. Threatening the rest of the city with his "POWDER KEG" community ready to blow up, that he continues to incite ...

Soon after, he elaborated in another post:

people like Barron keep pushing the wrong buttons and you might see fiction become reality.

I-Witness Video archived the page headlined "Barron to Storm the Palace" when it appeared on the website on December 4, 2006. A PDF is available here. Note: although the PDF software was unable to capture the background color of the page accurately, it is otherwise identical to its original appearance on the website.

The NYPD Rant website, which claims 120,000 daily viewers, functions as a stronghold of unconcealed racism and occasional, but vicious anti-Semitism. "Savage" is the word overwhelmingly favored to describe blacks. The term "African-American" is almost never used except derisively. The New York Observer has highlighted some of the Rant's most hate-filled remarks mocking Jews, particularly Hasidim.

EA1025's threatening comment appeared on the website after several days of increasingly agitated posts about the dangers which police officers could face from demonstrators at a protest against the shooting of Sean Bell, an unarmed Black man, by NYPD officers. People claiming to be police officers wrote messages on the website warning their colleagues that they could not count on police supervisors to allow them to defend themselves if they were attacked. The demonstration had originally been planned to take place at NYPD police headquarters at One Police Plaza, colloquially known as 1PP or the "Puzzle Palace," although it was relocated to Foley Square because of the size of the crowd.

Since NYPD Rant posters do not use their real names, it is usually impossible to determine whether the posters are actually police officers without a full-fledged investigation.

However, EA1025 left many clues about his identity on the Internet.

Last year EA1025, with 2467 rants to his name, wrote that he was related to Joseph Piagentini, an NYPD officer who was shot by the Black Liberation Army in 1971, in a thread which has since been removed from the website. He also wrote that he lived in Westbury on Long Island.

A few days ago EA1025 reported that he is in training to be a police officer at the Los Angeles Police Academy in a class of 70 recruits.

If it turns out that EA1025 is actually an LAPD recruit, he will have begun an eight-month program which includes 100 hours of what is described as "Human Relations": cultural sensitivity training, media relations, stress management and community relations, all of which he might find beneficial.