A police officer in the US state of Georgia has resigned from his position after footage showing him making a racist comment came to light when WSB-TV in Atlanta aired it on television. In the dash-cam footage (above) from July 2016, Cobb County police Lt Greg Abbott can be seen standing by a car parked on a road.

A white woman can be heard telling the officer that she was scared to put her hands down when he instructed her to make a call on her mobile phone. She said: “I’m really sorry, I’m just...I’ve just seen way too many videos of cops...” Presumably attempting to reassure her, the officer said: “But you’re not black. Remember, we only kill black people. All the videos you’ve seen, have you seen white people get killed?”

The woman (whose voice is audible in the video) was arrested for being under the influence of alcohol. Cobb County Police launched an investigation after the video was aired, and the officer was asked to resign. Cobb County police Chief Mike Register said in a statement: “No matter what context it was said, it shouldn’t have been said.” Confirming that Abbott would be fired, he added: “I don’t know what is in his heart, but I know what came out of his mouth. We recommend that he be terminated and we are moving forward on that.”

According to data in The Guardian, black Americans are more than twice as likely as their white counterparts to be killed by police after accounting for their respective populations. In 2016, police killed black Americans at a rate of 6.66 per million people, compared to 2.9 per million for white Americans.