I’ve got four posts up today, and I’m tired, but I can’t resist this one…
Outgoing D.C. Police Chief Pamela Smith decided to show what she was made of as she spoke as the honoree in a good-bye ceremony yesterday. The House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform had accused her of manipulating data to make it seem that crime has decreased in the District of Columbia when it had not. She could have stuck around, of course, until the final numbers were in, but instead she decided that she would leave her post “to be with her family.” That’s always a good dodge when you’re being investigated. In her farewell speech, she played the God card (she’s also a reverend at a Baptist church in D.C.), then the “haters” card, and finally the “it’s not my fault” card. Wait: are the statistics correct, or are they wrong? Smith’s argument somehow came out, “The statistics were accurate, but if they’re not, somebody else rigged them!”
That’s accountability, D.C. Government style!
“How dare you? How dare you attack my integrity? Attack my character? You don’t know who I belong to!” she said. Wait, what does THAT mean?
Of course Smith played the race card too. “It’s really not about me, it’s about those who don’t know how good God is,” Smith said. “They [mistook] my passion for being the angry Black woman … and sadly my passion is because I love this work. I love God’s people.”
Then she had her mic-drop moment, saying “I dare not leave without saying something to my haters. So I’m going to the Bible when I say this to my haters: F-you!” Whereupon, I assumed as planned, she backtracked, and executed her play on words, saying, after a pause, “It’s not a drop the mic moment..Watch me in this space [pause]…I forgive you. I forgive you.” Aw, isn’t that precious? See, she wanted her “haters” to hear “Fuck you!” because that’s what “F-you” means, always, and she wanted her supporters to hear “Fuck you!” because they would think, “Good for her, this proud black woman is really giving it to those racist House Republicans!,” see, but she really didn’t say “Fuck you,” see, she really meant “I forgive you!” Ha-hah!
Sure. I have this nice bridge in Brooklyn to sell you cheap if you’ll buy that. What she did was analogous to Trump saying “Let’s go Brandon!” and then pointing out a freind named Brandon in the crowd and claiming he really meant for him to “go.”
Here’s one listener who missed that “joke” entirely. You might say I was “hoist by my own petard,” because I have written several posts criticizing the news media for refusing to print “fuck” when someone says “fuck” and it is relevant to the story, as it was here. And what is usually printed is “f… you,” which is read “Eff you!” My argument: if they mean fuck and you are reporting fuck, don’t play code games or use euphemisms, write or say “fuck.” So when I heard Smith say what she says on the video, it didn’t occur to me for a second that “Eff you” didn’t mean “Fuck you,” because, you know, it didn’t. In my case, at least, “this isn’t a mic drop moment” didn’t register at all, so I interpreted the whole section as “Fuck you, haters, but I forgive you anyway.” It took a pointed comment from reader Zanshin (one of Ethics Alarms five veteran commenters) to set me straight, hence this revision from the original post
Smith denied being an “angry black woman,” then behaved like a furious black woman, a wildly unprofessional one too, but she did get her mic drop moment, which she said wasn’t one. Then many various news sources had their fun with the clickbait headline, “Outgoing DC Police Chief Tells Critics ‘F-you!.”
Well, as I wrote Zanshin, that cute bit, making everyone think she meant to say “fuck you” when that’s exactly what she wanted everyone to hear than disingenuously invoking the Bible by saying she really meant “I forgive you” all along, is an even worse reflection on the woman’s character if she just said “Fuck you!’,” which was completely consistent with her rant.
What an asshole.
So now, I guess, we’ll always have to wait when a speaker or a news editor uses “Eff you.” Hey, it might not mean “fuck you.” It might mean “forget you,” which is what screenwriters used for years to mean “fuck you” in G-rated movies and on TV. Or it could mean “I forgive you!” Or “I feed you.” Or “I feel you.” Maybe it means “I friend you on Facebook.” “I French kiss you.” “I fellate you?”
Interestingly, a majority of Post readers, who are usually reliably woke, weren’t fooled. Oh, the usual race-obsessed, Trump-deranged types wrote things like,
“So black women should not be angry when they are wrongly persecuted, lied on and berated by an orange president, Barb looking AG, and a few angry white men they lied about her cooking the books. All in the name of the president wanting to paint his narrative that the city was high in crime although crime is way down. No she should not bend the knee to a crooked, to criminal president.”
But the majority of comments were more in this vein…
- “She sounds like a nut. A nut as a police chief is NOT a good thing.”
- “Perhaps the most appallingly inept Police Chief of any major jurisdiction anywhere in the country.”
- “Cooked the books; got caught; got roasted when she had zero idea what chain of command was; DEI hire finally gone. Good riddance and eff u 2, dear.”
- “Looks like her final comments kind of sum things up! Incapable and incompetent.”
Snith’s rank deficit in character and professionalism does not reflect well on the people who chose her, notably Mayor Bowser. D.C.’s government and law enforcement has been disgraceful since I had hair. This police chief, a true DEI hire—-she joined the MPD in 2022 as its chief DEI officer—had little relavant experience for the job BUT she was historic! The first black woman to hold the job…and that’s what really matters.
Ethics Alarms 
Hi Jack,
You wrote,
Did you really hear and see that? Or are you repeating fake disinformation from her haters?
I heard her say,
“I dare not leave without saying something to my haters. So I’m going to the Bible when I say this to my haters: Effe you! [. . .] I forgive you. I FORGIVE you!.”
Oh, good for her…she “got” me. I obviously listened to that part of her speech, because I had the YouTube clip of it. And I heard her say “Fuck you” because that’s what she wanted me to hear, and her audience too. When people say “F-you,” that’s what they mean. To be honest, the “joke” of adding “I forgive you” escaped me completely, because the “f” gag didn’t register. I honestly thought her meaning was “Fuck you haters, but I forgive you too, because I’m a woman of God.” (And “…” isn’t exactly fair and accurate on your part, because “[pause]It’s not a drop the mic moment[pause] watch me in this space [long pause]” is one reason I didn’t catch it.
Thanks for the pointer, and in my opinion, what she did was even worse than what I thought she did. And I’m going to revise the post to reflect that.
I am intrigued by the consistent use of the word “haters”. It now appears to be used by any minority undergoing any level of criticism. If criticism of someone translates to hate then using the term to describe all of Trump’s detractors would logically apply as well.
If criticism is synonymous with hate then I have faced a lot of hate from teachers and students in my lifetime and never became unglued because of it.
Claiming hate as a motive for criticism or alleged wrongdoing seems like the ultimate dodge.
Hi Jack,
Regarding the part where Smith said, “[pause]It’s not a drop the mic moment[pause] watch me in this space [long pause]“
Rhetorical the sequence should have been,
Rhetorical analysis
However, during step 4 the pause, someone in the audience shouted, “Drop the mic!
And that meant that Smith could not go straight to step 5 the reframe. She had to respond and she did so in two steps.
As Jack wrote, this intermezzo is one of the reasons he missed the reframe.
And, to be fair, it was one of the reasons I replaced it wih “[. . .]”.
Thanks again. I didn’t hear the shout on the video and none of the sources I read mentioned the shout. But then, live by F-word games, die by them. It was her fault.
From Washington Post, Dec. 20, 2025: “‘If I’m hiding crime numbers, then the chief of police is going to, rightfully so, take resources out of my district and send them somewhere else, and I don’t want that,’ said one commander.”
So, an ACTUAL decline in crime would also cost you resources? If you want more resources for your district, would you maintain crime (numbers)? How would one do that? Maybe by tolerating a moderate level of crime – enough to justify your resources, but not so much as to invite federal intervention? Know your community; know your criminals; make sure everyone knows what you’ll put up with, and what you’ll investigate/prosecute.
The overall tone of the article asserts a “glass half-full/half-empty” cherry-picking approach to the investigation of crime statistics, where the Republicans saw unacceptable high levels of crime, while Democrats saw acceptable declines in crime. (This reminds me of a part of the immigration argument: Republicans see immigrants committing crimes, and Democrats see immigrants committing no more crimes than native-born criminals. They’re both right about the facts, but putting their own spin on the facts.)
“Democrats see immigrants committing no more crimes than native-born criminals.”
Illegal Migrants Less Likely to Commit Crime? Guess Again.
PWS
Easily one of the most dishonest and transparently false rationalizations for open borders.
Does she honestly thinks that she can hide her very intentional “F you”, aka “fuck you” in our cultural language base – and she knows it, behind pre and post “it isn’t what it is” rationalizations and the ignorant masses will swallow her lying rationalizations as fact?
How fucking stupid does she think people are?
Logic dictates that she wouldn’t have felt any need whatsoever to rationalize if her actual intent was to actually say “I forgive you”. If a person, especially a pastor, intends to say “I forgive you”, they don’t hide it in cultural bull shit, they simply state it.
She is a liar, and I’d be willing to state that straight to her face.
Hey, what color would she be if they ran her through a hydraulic press?
Flat black.
Incorrigible.
Sorry, couldn’t resist. Honk! Honk! Wocka! Wocka! 😀