Jack Harlow is calling for the firing of a police officer after a video appeared to show the man putting his hand around a woman’s neck outside of the star’s concert.
Harlow shared the clip on his Instagram Wednesday (Dec. 29) and tagged the location as Atlanta, where he performed on Tuesday at the Coca-Cola Roxy as part of The Crème De La Crème Tour. The 13-second clip shows a distraught young woman approaching two police officers and pleading with them by saying, “All I wanted to go do was go to a Jack Harlow show,” while one of the officers appears to put his hand on the woman’s neck and pushes her away from him while telling her to “get out of my face.”
“This video came to my attention a few hours ago. When I watched it I was disgusted by that cop and all I wanted to do was make something good happen for this girl immediately,” Harlow captioned the video. “I told the world to help me identify her so I could find a way to give her a hug and give her as many tickets to as many shows as she wants. But that’s not enough and its not a solution to a systemic issue that people who don’t look like me have to face.”
“The next step is identifying this police officer and getting him unemployed as fast as we can,” the “Industry Baby” hitmaker continued in his post. “Assaulting a young woman and putting his hands on her neck is sickening. I look out in the crowd every night and see black women in my front row…screaming my lyrics, traveling to see me, supporting me, riding for me. I want this woman, and every black woman that supports me to know – I am so sorry. I want you to be protected and I want this guy to lose his job so fucking fast. I love you. Let’s find this officer.”
A spokesperson for the Cobb County Police Department tells Billboard, “The Cobb County Police Department takes any and all allegations of officer misconduct very seriously. We are aware of the video snippet posted to Instagram involving our officer and a young woman outside the Coca-Cola Roxy. The incident is going through an internal review to get a full understanding of the entire incident before any potential action is taken.”
Harlow has been very vocal about supporting the Black community while knowing his place as “a white man in a Black genre,” the Grammy-nominated rapper told Billboard in a recent interview. “There is a certain reality that I am white, and I think there will always be something attached to that. No matter how embraced I am, there will never be a day that I’m Black. With that being said, there’s a certain responsibility that comes with being a white man in a Black genre, and there’s certain things that have me regarded differently. But there is something exciting about skipping over any barriers that might be there and creating unity.”
The 23-year-old Louisville, Ky., native participated in protests in his hometown following the death of Breonna Taylor, a 26-year-old EMT who was fatally shot by Louisville police while she was sleeping in her home on March 13, 2020. “It was a no-brainer for me in terms of where I stood on the topic. There was a moment last summer when we were all marching through the city and there was this feeling that this is historic,” he told Footwear News in his cover story from July 2021. “This isn’t a viral moment, this is going to be in textbooks and is something I’m going to be able to tell my grandkids about. There was a gravity to what was going on where you felt like you had a responsibility. Where are you going to fall? You can’t be on the fence for this.”