Raphael Warnock Uses His Brother as Proof That the Justice System is Racist, but the Record Tells a Different Story

Forget Jan. 6, 2021; the bigger assault on America happened a day earlier when Rev. Raphael Warnock won his runoff election to ascend to the Senate. (You can read my explanation of how it happened here.)

Warnock hasn’t met a left-wing cause he didn’t like, and he has stood up for plenty of issues that don’t line up with the values of mainstream Georgians. The pastor of Martin Luther King’s Ebenezer Baptist Church even voted in favor of the Democrats’ extreme legislation that attempted (but thankfully failed) to codify Roe v. Wade into law.

One of Warnock’s favorite topics to discuss is the supposed racism in the American criminal justice system, and he thinks he has a personal story to back it up. Warnock loves to talk about his older half-brother Keith Coleman, whom Warnock claims has been sentenced to life in prison as a “first-time,” “nonviolent” drug offender because of the racism embedded in our court system.

“[My brother] was a first-time offender, convicted of a nonviolent drug-related offense, in which no one got hurt, no one died, no one even got high because the federal government basically created the sting operation,” Warnock said in a 2020 speech.

When police justifiably shot 27-year-old Rayshard Brooks in the racially charged summer of 2020, Warnock spoke at Brooks’ funeral the same day Coleman was released from prison.

“It has become too common to counsel families grieving from unjust loss, like that of Rayshard Brooks, or to grieve from separation,” Warnock said that day. “I have known this pain personally, and my family has experienced it over the last 22 years of my brother’s incarceration.”

Warnock has often brazenly compared Coleman to victims of police violence and held his brother up as Exhibit A that law enforcement in the United States is racist.

It turns out that Coleman’s story is a tale of police corruption, but the twist is that it’s Coleman who was the dirty cop. Here are the receipts, according to Alana Goodman of the Washington Free Beacon.

“Coleman was a cop with the Savannah Police Department when he was convicted of facilitating a cross-country cocaine trafficking operation in 1996 and 1997—and once warned that he could send a drug dealer’s ‘black ass’ to prison if the dealer didn’t pay Coleman more money,” Goodman writes.

The FBI launched an investigation into corruption in the Savannah, Ga. police department in November 1995. “Operation Broken Oath” targeted officers who were accepting bribes from drug dealers.

“The probe ensnared nearly a dozen police officers who agreed to provide paid security for undercover FBI agents and informants posing as cocaine traffickers,” reports Goodman.

Keith Coleman was one of those corrupt cops. He escorted cocaine dealers as they transported drugs to hotels, airports, and warehouses. He recruited four more officers, telling them exactly what they were getting into. He served as the liaison between the criminals and the dirty cops, who had sworn an oath to protect the people of Savannah but were using their department-issued weapons and vehicles to help drug dealers transport their product.

Coleman pushed the dealers to pay the cops more money and often pocketed what was supposed to go to another officer in his illegal employ. When an FBI agent undercover as a drug dealer offered Coleman $1,500 for his services, the dirty officer demanded more money.

Audio captured Coleman saying, “If I knowed [sic] I was f***ing with a motherf***er off the corner who can’t afford [to pay me] no more than $1,500, his black ass would be in prison.”

The court sentenced Coleman to life in prison in 1997, but he went free in 2020.

Raphael Warnock once preached that “you can sometimes wear the colors of the state and behave like a thug.” He should know from his half-brother’s experience. Yet he holds Coleman up as evidence of the racism in America’s justice system.

The reverend’s hypocrisy knows no bounds.