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On Tuesday, the Multnomah County Sheriff's Office abruptly fired a reserve deputy of nearly 14 years named Radek Pospisil.
The sheriff's office provided a terse explanation for the termination.
"Mr. Radek Pospisil served as a part-time, volunteer reserve deputy with the Sheriff's Office," spokesman Chris Liedle said in an email to WW. "Pospisil is no longer part of our agency. We cannot comment further."
But Pospisil said the agency told him he was being terminated because of his social media postings. On Feb. 16, Pospisil says, he was called into the sheriff's office, told he would be attending a training.
"I was taken in a room. They said, 'I guess you are wondering why the hell you are here,' and then they told me that HR has a strict policy toward social media postings and that my position was terminated. That is it," Pospisil said in a message to WW. "When I walked in, I was met by command staff who fired me. I was side-swiped with no representation."
Pospisil's publicly available Facebook page consists of primarily pro-police content, including a photo of himself in November standing in uniform in front of a sheriff's vehicle wishing his friends a safe Thanksgiving.
Some of Pospisil's posts are more overtly political. On Sept. 30, 2020, he shared a video of conservative pundit David Harris Jr. defending the Proud Boys, a far-right organization, and claiming the group is not affiliated with white supremacy. (The day prior, Donald Trump had made the infamous "Proud Boys — stand back and stand by" remark during a presidential debate.)
"LOVE PROUD BOYS!!!!" Pospisil wrote Sept. 30 as a caption to the Harris Jr. video he shared.
Days earlier, on Sept. 25, ahead of the planned Proud Boys rally in North Portland's Delta Park, Pospisil shared a video of Proud Boy leaders Joe Biggs and Enrique Tarrio speaking at a press conference.
"This is funny, smart move proud boys," Pospisil wrote alongside the video in a Sept. 25 post.
On Feb. 3, he shared a link to a fundraising campaign seeking to raise money for the legal fees of Alan Swinney, another Proud Boys member who faces charges of assault and unlawful use of a weapon. Prosecutors allege that Swinney pointed a revolver at someone during an Aug. 22 protest, injured another person with a paintball gun, and unlawfully discharged mace at an Aug. 15 protest.
On Dec. 13, Pospisil shared the music video by Playboy The Beast called "Stand Back and Stand By"—a riff on Trump's Sept. 29 comments. In the video, a rapper decked out in MAGA gear says, "The Proud Boys [are] ready for the civil war. Seventy million or 7 billion, y'all don't really want to brawl."
Pospisil's firing comes amid national scrutiny into whether current or former law enforcement officers participated in the deadly attack on the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6. The attack on Congress included many Proud Boys and members of right-wing paramilitary groups.
The Multnomah County Sheriff's Office is headed by Mike Reese, a longtime Democrat, who doubled his donation to the Biden-Harris campaign in September after Trump erroneously declared during a debate that the "Portland sheriff" endorsed his reelection bid.
Pospisil says he has a spotless record of nearly 14 years with the sheriff's office, and that he was recently certified with the agency's marine unit. He said that, as a reserve volunteer, he is not paid.
"I don't think it was fair," he says of the firing. "They could have brought me in and spoken about it like adults. At the most, I should have been allowed to resign as others have been allowed in the past. No one that I have spoken to can understand what happened."