When it comes to going incognito online and spouting-off on how you really feel about African-Americans, immigrants, leftists and poor people, the unhinged Right Wing have embraced this ability with unabashed love.
The problem for them is, they sometimes get caught. They are disgraced and lose their job. And if a Columbus Division of Police officer from the under-siege Vice unit is posting on a local progressive-minded activist group’s Facebook page that Columbus sex workers are better off dead, then the FBI needs to investigate.
Everyone knows the story of Donna Dalton, the young mother who was shot 8 times in August by Columbus Vice undercover officer Andrew Mitchell, who was already under investigation by internal affairs.
Public outrage and speculation against Mitchell erupted, and Columbus Police Chief Kim Jacobs suspended him. Citing the Vice unit’s arrest of porn-actress and Trump liaison Stormy Daniels earlier that summer, Chief Jacobs then suspended all Vice operations. Jacobs subsequently transferred the ongoing Vice investigation to the FBI.
On the day after Donna’s death, our friend’s at Yes We Can, a local progressive-activist group, posted about Donna, saying “everyone deserves to be safe,” and Columbus police needs to “practice de-escalation and respect, not brute force.”
Followers of Yes We Can responded with sympathy, and a long thread below the post went back-and-forth with some questioning whether the officer was justified in killing Donna after she allegedly stabbed him with a knife.
One person who joined the thread was a Deanna Rosser, who immediately began defending the Vice officer. Deanna Rosser wrote, “Why are people defending a prostitute that stabbed a police officer? Make the madness stop.”
Another person asked Deanna Rosser whether the strategies Columbus police use to arrest sex workers amount to entrapment.
Deanna Rosser responded with this: “How about kudos for CPD for cleaning our streets of just another whore?”
Bad enough, but some in the thread soon began questioning just who exactly Deanna Rosser really is. Because when you go to Rosser’s Facebook page, the account is shared between Steve and Deanna Rosser. A page where the posts are pro-police and pro-conservative.
And in threads for some posts on the page of Steve and Deanna Rosser, the respondents are writing the name “Steve” and directly talking to this “Steve.”
If you’ve been following the travails of the Columbus police Vice unit you may recall that a Vice officer named Steve Rosser helped arrest Stormy Daniels in July.
In a police camera video from the Stormy Daniels arrest obtained by the Cincinnati Enquirer, Officer Steve Rosser is heard saying to Daniels, “If you use any anatomical part of your body like your chest to put it upon people’s faces, that’s a misdemeanor of the first degree.”
Daniels politely tells Rosser no one had warned her about Ohio’s Community Defense Act which forbids patrons from touching employees in sexually-oriented businesses.
Rosser asks, “So if someone doesn’t tell you that the speed limit is 55 but you’re doing 65, are you innocent?”
“No, but speed limits are marked,” she responded.
Stormy Daniel’s rebuttal makes sense to us, but what also made sense was where Rosser stood politically – with Trump. Daniels’ lawyer Michael Avenatti found that Rosser’s social media accounts were very pro-Trump, showing a meme with a “Cops for Trump/Pence” logo, for example. Following Avenatti’s discovery, Rosser apparently deleted those accounts.
So the question for us is, who wrote on the Yes We Can Facebook page that Columbus police should be congratulated and celebrated for killing Donna Dalton? Was it Steve Rosser or Deanna Rosser? Or someone completely unrelated?
We at the Free Press commend those police officers who risk their lives every day. It’s a thankless job that doesn’t pay enough.
But we don’t accept any excuses from anyone who say sex workers should die, and if there’s evidence showing that Deanna Rosser may be the wife of a Columbus police officer whose duty is to arrest sex workers, or that Deanna Rosser is actually Steve Rosser going incognito, then this needs to be part of the FBI investigation.
The Free Press tried to reach both the Columbus police internal affairs and local FBI sources to see if they could verify whether Deanna Rosser is the wife of Vice officer Steve Rosser. No one responded, typical of how local law enforcement treats the Free Press.
If it is discovered that a Vice officer made these statements about Donna Dalton, perhaps this callousness and casualness about wishing death on young women committing a non-violent offense is pervasive throughout the entire Vice unit.
Such cold-heartedness may explain why an officer would pile on, so to speak, and put eight bullets into a mother of two young children.