A police department in Peoria, Illinois was trying to recruit a new officer call of Duty-inspired campaign on social media, and it was as tone-deaf as you could imagine. The post, which was originally shared on the Peoria Police Department’s social media page, showed three white men posing with weapons and wearing tactical gear. “Stop playing games and answer Call of Duty,” the post reads, with the “Call of Duty” portion of the poster written in the same text as activationis the hugely popular (and more than occasionally problematic) first-person shooter franchise.
The post immediately sparked a flood of negative reactions online. It was Shared on the Peoria, IL subreddit and on Facebook by citizens of the central Illinois city of more than 100,000 residents. “I can’t believe that more than likely multiple people looked at this and said this is what we need to recruit,” one Reddit user wrote. A Facebook user who shared the recruiting poster wrote, “Literally pointing guns but telling the kids to put the guns down while all the white men are pointing their guns…at whom.” They mentioned then the more than missing person case that has been going on for seven years of Alexis Scott, a young black woman who went missing in September 2017 US Census Bureau websiteThe City of Peoria’s population is more than 50% white, with approximately 26% identifying as Black.
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The police apologize for this call of Duty job ad
On February 28, Police Chief Eric Echevarria apologized in a statement to police Peoria Journal StarSaying:
It was never my intention to offend any of our community members with the recruiting flyer posted on our Facebook page yesterday. It was simply a recruiting image that I thought would resonate and appeal to a younger generation. I take responsibility for this and sincerely apologize. Our goal is to recruit the best and most qualified officers to this police department in a caring and respectful manner.
There are several reasons why this ad should never have existed, reasons that would be obvious to many of us who don’t blindly “support the blue.” First, call of Duty is largely a game about randomly shooting lots of predetermined “bad guys” (who are often brown), and the American police are notoriously trigger-happy. Accordingly Mapping police violence, one of several websites that attempt to compile cases of American police brutality, police killed 1,352 people in 2023, and are responsible for the deaths of 150 people so far in 2024. The website also states that in Illinois, blacks are 6.6 times more likely to be killed by police than whites. Use call of Dutya game where shooting people increases numbers (and that’s a good thing) as a frame of reference for the general mood of your police force is a downright bad look.
Then there’s the poster itself, which is clearly worn call of Duty Font and the style of advertising art (My city I’ve reached out to Activision for comment), with the three officers in full tactical gear surrounded by orange smoke as if they were in the middle of a battlefield. This is not indicative of your local police officer’s average day – police departments’ special forces are often made up of experienced officers with at least some semblance of military or tactical training, not recent high school graduates with a 3.0K/Don degree Modern Warfare III. And even if you do eventually make it into a special forces unit, it’s highly unlikely that you’ll spend your time in the task force in full military garb, surrounded by smoke, saving innocent lives. Plus, these units are just as fallible as any other police officer…Drug cops killed Breonna Taylorremember?
Third, the clay pigeon, call of Duty The LARPing poster features three white people, which is not exactly welcome for people of color who want to join the force. It certainly doesn’t help allay the (proven) fears that white police officers disproportionately target black and brown people, does it?
The saddest part is that it’s not the first time call of Duty and other military-inspired games were used as dubious recruiting methods. In 2022 it was announced that the The army wanted to spend millions on advertising campaigns everywhere IGN and that call of Duty Esports League. There was even one official US Army Esports Twitch account, even though her last saved highlight is from four years ago. The more we mix games together call of Duty Real, real jobs where you get guns make an already bad situation that much worse.
I hope everyone learned something today, especially the Peoria Police Department. Now they can return Participate in local college fairs in an attempt to recruit impressionable youth.
