Sergeant Mike Rood tweeted a message to Dan White, the head of the Ultimate Fighting Championship website, after the UFC website was hacked. Rood wrote: "get those hacking (expletive). I'm a cop in the Bay Area. I would go at them with both guns!"
The Contra Costa Times reports that critics, including the hacker group Anonymous, viewed Rood's comment as a criminal threat because he called for using weapons to deal with the problem.
Posts on the Richmond police department's Facebook page are calling for the agency to discipline the officer.