There has been a lot of talk about Justin Barrett, a police officer with Boston. He made fame yesterday when it was exposed that he wrote a letter to the media and referred to Henry Gates as a “banana eating jungle monkey’”. if you missed it, here’s the run down:

The law enforcement official, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said Officer Justin Barrett referred to the black scholar as a ” jungle monkey” in the letter, written in reaction to media coverage of Gates’s arrest July 16.

Barrett, a 36-year-old who has been on the job for two years, was stripped of his gun and badge yesterday and faces a termination hearing in the next week, said police spokeswoman Elaine Driscoll. He has no previous disciplinary record, she said.

Barrett will be represented by the police union in his hearing, as he should be. This gets into a very iffy area of our first amendment rights. One way he may have stripped himself of that protection though is by identifying himself as a police officer in his “anonymous” email.

But there is something more interesting here. In Barrett’s letter he made a statement that should be a warning sign that a person does not understand the very fundamental’s of our nation’s laws:

According to Officer Barrett a person who is a suspect has no rights. This is the most absurd thing I have ever heard. You can be caught red handing raping and killing a child, and under our laws you do still have rights. Its in our Constitution, something Officer Barrett has sworn to uphold more than once – as a police officer and as a member of the armed forces. For a police officer to even suggest such a thing goes beyond the pale.

So if they determine that Officer Barrett’s racial rampage is considered protected under the first amendment, then perhaps they need to look at this statement and ask him about rights. How could he be protected by a very right that he is trying to state American Citizens don’t have, just because the police think they might be suspicious?