Call of Duty-inspired police recruitment ad sparks outrage

Peoria, Ill., Police Department attempts to recruit new officers call of Duty-Inspiration The campaign on social media, as you might imagine, fell on deaf ears.this postalPhotos originally shared on the Peoria Police Department’s social media pages showed three white men wearing tactical gear and posing with guns.The post reads: “Stop playing games and answer the call of duty.” The text in the “Call of Duty” part of the poster is the same as activisionThe popular (and occasionally problematic) first-person shooter series.

The post immediately drew a flood of negative responses online.it is Share on the Peoria, IL Reddit subreddit Residents of the central Illinois city, which has a population of more than 100,000, posted the message on Facebook.”I can’t believe they actually probably a lot of people saw this and said this is what we need to recruit,” one Reddit user wrote. “Actually,” one Facebook user who shared the recruitment poster wrote Aiming a gun, but telling the kids to put the gun down, while all the white people pointed their guns at… whoever was aiming.” Then they mentioned more than A seven-year missing persons case Alexis Scott was a young black woman who disappeared in September 2017. U.S. Census Bureau websitePeoria’s population is more than 50% white, of which about 26% are black.

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Police Department apologizes call of Duty Recruitment Advertisement

Police Chief Eric Echevarria apologized to the department in a statement on Feb. 28. peoria magazine star,explain:

It was not my intention to offend any of our community members with the recruitment flyer posted on our Facebook page yesterday. I think it’s just a recruiting image that will attract and connect with the younger generation. I take responsibility for this and sincerely apologize. Our goal is to recruit the best, most qualified officers to the police department in the most caring and respectful manner.

There are several reasons why this ad shouldn’t exist, reasons that will be obvious to many of us who don’t blindly “go blue.” First, call of Duty For the most part, this is a game about indiscriminately shooting a number of predetermined “bad guys” (usually brown people), and American police are notoriously good at shooting.according to Mapping police violenceis one of several websites trying to catalog incidents of police brutality in the United States, with police killing 1,352 people in 2023 and, as of 2024, responsible for 150 deaths. The website also notes that in Illinois, black people are 6.6 times more likely to be killed by police than white people.use call of Dutya game where shooting people makes the numbers go up (which is a good thing), looks pretty bad as a frame of reference for the overall vibe of a police force.

A now-removed ad for the Peoria Police Department.

image: Peoria Police Department/Activision Blizzard

Then there’s the poster itself, which is obviously plagiarized. call of Duty Fonts and their promotional art styles (my city Activision Blizzard was contacted for comment), the three officers are heavily armed and surrounded by orange smoke, as if they were on a battlefield. That’s not representative of the average local police job — police department special forces units are typically made up of veteran officers with at least military or tactical training, rather than fresh-faced high school graduates with 3.0 K/.University Teachers modern warfare 3. Even if you end up in Special Forces, you’re unlikely to spend your time in Tactical Forces, performing full-scale military role-playing in a smoke-filled situation and saving innocent lives. Plus, these units are just as prone to making mistakes as any other police force—Narcotics cops were the ones who killed Breonna Taylorremember?

Third, tone-deaf, call of Duty There were three white people on the LARPing poster, which wasn’t exactly welcoming to any people of color who wanted to join the ranks. This certainly doesn’t help alleviate the (proven) concerns that white police officers disproportionately target black and brown people, does it?

The saddest thing is that this is not the first time call of Duty and other military-inspired games have been used as dubious recruitment methods. In 2022, it was revealed that Army wants to spend millions Advertising activities in various places IGN and call of Duty Esports league.There’s even a The official Twitch account for U.S. Army eSports, even though their last saved highlights were from four years ago.The more we lump similar games together call of Duty Real life jobs expose you to guns and an already bad situation becomes even worse.

I hope everyone learned something today, especially the Peoria Police Department.Now they can go back Display at local college fair Trying to recruit impressionable young people.

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