Two high-ranking officers have left the Cambridge Police Department in recent months after they were involved in controversial social media incidents in 2020.
CPD spokesperson Jeremy C. Warnick confirmed in an email that former Lieutenant Shawn Lynch is “no longer with the department,” and former Superintendent Jack Albert retired from CPD after 33 years.
Lynch departed CPD following a department investigation into a now-deleted Twitter account which a city resident suspected might belong to Lynch in September 2020. Warnick wrote that CPD determined the account did, in fact, belong to Lynch, but did not specify the terms of his exit.
The account handle carried the lieutenant s name and badge “@CPD496,” and contained posts that seemingly made light of police brutality. For example, a tweet replied to a news article about police brutality with a GIF of applause from actor Will Smith. Another post in reaction to a tweet about the police shooting of Jacob Blake, a Black man
A Cambridge police lieutenant who was being investigated in connection to racist and violent social media posts is no longer working at the Cambridge Police Department, a spokesperson confirmed to WBUR.
The department began investigating Lieutenant Shawn Lynch in September. Prior to the scandal, Lynch had not been on duty since May because of unrelated reasons, the city said at the time.
At the time, the department confirmed the Twitter account in question belonged to Lynch, but was looking into whether he had made the statements.
As WBUR previously reported, tweets from the account targeted U.S. Rep. Ayanna Pressley, who is Black; referred to the Democratic Party as “American Jihadists”; and included retweets of posts critical of Black Lives Matter.