Washington: A police chief in Texas has apologized after a photo went viral of two officers mounted on horseback walking a handcuffed black man by a rope, as if on a leash. The image caused outrage, serving as a painful reminder of some of the bleakest moments in America's brutally racist past, including the chaining of enslaved people and lynching of blacks in the Jim Crow South in the years after emancipation.
Vernon Hale, police chief for the coastal Texas city of Galveston, said that Donald Neely, who was arrested Saturday for trespassing, should have been taken to the station in a police car, but only mounted officers were available. Neely was then escorted on foot, led by a length of rope and flanked by the mounted officers."Although this is a trained technique and best practice in some scenarios, I believe our officers showed poor judgement in this instance," said Hale, in a statement published Monday on Facebook.
