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Following the horrific discovery that North Miami Beach Police were using mugshots of African-American men as shooting targets, the police chief denied any racial profiling, claiming the practice was common for “facial recognition drills.”

That’s a response National Guard Sgt. Valerie Deant — the woman who found that her brother was one of those mugshots — and the members of the clergy aren’t buying. And in a new online protest, priests, ministers, and seminarians have taken to Twitter and Facebook to express their concern and give the department a message — #usemeinstead.

And the controversial hashtag, which dares law enforcement to shoot clergy members instead of black and brown faces, is catching fire on social media.

From the Washington Post:

The idea originated on a closed Facebook group for Lutheran clergy, where pastors were discussing how North Miami Beach’s police department had been caught using mugshots of actual people for target practice. Let’s send in our own photos for target practice, the pastors decided.

[…]

Rev. Joy M. Gonnerman and other pastors chatted about the story on the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America Facebook group and discussed how to respond to something that was emblematic of a deeper, systematic problem.

“Maybe we ought it make it harder to pull the trigger, and volunteer to put pictures of their family up,” Gonnerman  said. Another poster said she would send a photo of herself to the North Miami Beach Police Department.

So Rev. Lura N. Groen of Houston created a Facebook event, and, along with Gonnerman and others, invited friends to post pictures of themselves in their clerical clothing. Soon, people — many, but not all of them, clergy — began tweeting images using the hashtag #UseMeInstead.

The effort was “motivated by our service to Christ and his call to love our neighbors,” Gonnerman told The Post.

And respond they did:

The images of clergy calling for police to shoot them is meant to be striking — images of white clergy members in clothing that represents peace may cause those pulling the trigger to think twice, members told the Post.

“It’s such a desensitization thing, that if you start aiming at young black men, and told to put a bullet in them, you become desensitized,” Gonnerman said. “Maybe, to change the picture, it’s you know what, dare ya, shoot a clergy person.”

Check out the hashtag here.

SOURCE: Think Progress, Twitter, WashPost | PHOTO CREDIT: Twitter