53 year old Sgt. Silvia Cotriss has been terminated from the Roswell Police Department after 20 years with the force. She was fired for flying the Confederate flag outside of her own home and says, she didn’t know that people found the flag offensive.
Nearby residents reported her stars and bars but Cotriss says she’s going to appeal the July 14th firing.
“If I knew it offended someone, my friends, my family, I wouldn’t do it,” Cotriss, 53, told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. “Police officers have to adjust a lot of things in our lives, and for 20 years my whole life has been about making change and being held to a higher standard. We take an oath to help and protect people, so we can’t have a private life that’s really bad.”
Yet the flag displayed on a pole in the front yard of her Woodstock home for over a year “brought discredit to the Roswell Police Department,” a police captain wrote in Cotriss’ termination. She told detectives who interviewed her about the flag that it’s “part of her history, part of the South, part of history involving the Civil War.”
A Roswell police officer got fired for flying this Confederate flag in her yard. We have the investigative report. pic.twitter.com/rg67jPGZDc
— Richard Elliot (@RElliotWSB) July 27, 2016
“Cops don’t watch the news because we live it in the day and don’t want to see it again at night,” Cotriss told the local newspaper.
