As someone who has spent time in Ohio and that surrounding area, there are some major wake up calls here. Things like that are said all of the time, and the same people are the ones that feel their civil liberties are being challenged when in the presence of anyone likely to be offended by not being able to vocalize any such hateful language. I am not talking about just African Americans in this case, this includes women, intellectuals, minorities, wealthy people, children of wealthy people, people presumed to be associated with any of the afore mentioned groups, and so on and basically anyone that might be able to "rat them out."
I mention some of these things because historically, long before the age of information and enlightenment, competing groups of fire fighters used to compete for territory by burning down and robbing houses, particularly targeting those with any presumed wealth or ability to be exploited, and the more removed you get from our era, the further back in history you go.
Fire fighting, arson, these things have existed simultaneously as long as the other has existed. It is a dangerous profession and must be averted in the form of smoke detectors, humidity monitors, specialized lidar sensors, and other computer aided automation designed to automatically enable sprinkler systems as well as escape routes.
We have a long way to go, but jobs like these are 100% for the robots, and while I generally commend the bravery of people willing to put their lives on the line for such things, rarely do we see scenes of heroism and bravery like in the movies as that is completely unsafe and unorthodox. I actually saw fire fighters called to action on a college campus (IE presumably top class personnel), and they approached each step with thorough safety and did not condone placing themselves in danger as misguided attempts at saving others. Thankfully the house had been evacuated quickly, which was their first priority in assessing, and then they quickly and aggressively put the fire out with the use of something I don't know the name of, but what I will call anti-oxygen grenades, and a bunch of other really smart equipment I didn't even know about. They had people enter (almost) simultaneously from the top and bottom floors, and it was all super impressive. They were like a trained SWAT team and the whole thing happened in a few minutes.
They had the fire truck, the water hoses, and even the fire hydrant, but they didn't use any of those things till long after the threat was cleared (if at all, I don't remember).
They had been informed of the fire via smoke detectors as well as the dozens of calls and alerts, and literally they showed up within seconds of the fire starting.
While humans like that will definitely not be replaced anytime soon, at least the part where they walk inside to throw and initiate the use of such equipment can easily be delegated to robots. Seriously, my point is that they might as well have been highly trained robots. Who else would you want saving your life?
Anyway, this was a long long long stretch from that town and neighborhood, and as far as I had lived there, there had never been a single fire. Of course that doesn't mean there weren't fires that I didn't know about and whatnot, but I guess this is my roundabout way of saying that they were not at all the caliber of people I witnessed on the college campus. It is good if there were no fires, and I certainly don't want to see jobs going away for good people, but at the same time, a job that requires you to put your life at risk, but mostly remain idle waiting for disasters, is an extremely unproductive system that is designed to fail, while simultaneously promoting a culture of inactivity and boredom, which leads to dissatisfaction and ignorance.
Anyway the whole thing about the robots was completely an aside, this guy is totally an asshole for saying what he did, and imo whether or not he gets a second chance from his friends and family at being human or not, there isn't a chance in the world he doesn't deserve to be made an example out of (too late). The reality is, which I know from experience is that he will become public enemy number one, and the people he might have been relying on support such that he had the comfort in saying what he did, will be his most brutal opponents in not showing any sympathy whatsoever.