Two police officers in Gretna, La., were fired on Monday, four days after one of them referred to Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez as a “vile idiot” on social media and suggested that she should be shot.
Chief Arthur Lawson of the Gretna Police Department announced the terminations, saying that Charles Rispoli, the officer who wrote the Facebook post, and Angelo Varisco, who liked the post online, had violated the department’s social media policy.
“This incident, we feel, has been an embarrassment to our department,” Chief Lawson said at a news conference. “These officers have certainly acted in a manner which was unprofessional, alluding to a violent act to be conducted against a sitting U.S. congressman, a member of our government. We’re not going to tolerate that.”
Mr. Rispoli, a 14-year veteran of the Police Department, said in a Facebook post on Thursday that Ms. Ocasio-Cortez “needs a round — and I don’t mean the kind she used to serve,” a reference to her past work as a bartender, according to a screenshot of the comment obtained by The Times-Picayune of New Orleans.
Mr. Varisco joined the department in 2016. In the screenshot, his name can be seen as one of four who reacted to the post, either with a laughing face emoji or a thumbs-up.
Neither Mr. Rispoli nor Mr. Varisco could be reached for comment on Monday evening.
“I applaud the investigation,” Belinda Constant, the mayor of Gretna, said in an interview. “I think it was done appropriately, it was done expeditiously, and it absolutely was the right decision.”
Ms. Ocasio-Cortez, Democrat of New York, is a self-described democratic socialist and has been a strong critic of President Trump. She is one of four first-year female Democrats in the House — three of whom were born in the United States — who were told by Mr. Trump to “go back” to their countries in a Twitter post last week.
A representative of Ms. Ocasio-Cortez declined to comment on Monday night.
Chief Lawson said he had trouble understanding Mr. Rispoli’s post, especially since the article he shared — which claimed that Ms. Ocasio-Cortez had said soldiers were paid too much — was satirical.
“I think he just got caught up in the heat of the moment,” Chief Lawson said. “And this wasn’t even a real news article.”
Neither officer had patrolled the streets, Chief Lawson said. He said Mr. Varisco had provided security for the courts, and Mr. Rispoli had also worked in the courts before he began supervising “individuals who were in the home incarceration program.”
The action against the officers in Louisiana came at a time of increased scrutiny of police officers’ activity on social media.
The project spawned investigations and repercussions in Philadelphia, Phoenix, St. Louis and elsewhere.
Chief Lawson said that Gretna police officers had been trained and made aware of other episodes across the country in which officials had gotten into trouble for inappropriate social media posts.
“With all of those efforts, something like this still happens,” he said. “And it’s very disturbing. It certainly shows a lack of the officers paying attention to what’s going on in the world around them.”
Neil Vigdor contributed reporting.
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