GPD Basketball Cop Bobby White and Ignite Life Center; How Are They Connected?
Edited 12/8: Mistakenly reported that White rose to fame in January 2015, when it was January 2016.
Editor’s Notes: The following information was originally reported in an article about White’s arrest of Anthony Gainey.
Gainesville Police Department (GPD) Officer Bobby White helped build the basketball court at Ignite Life Center (ILC) in December 2016 with his Basketball Cop Foundation.
According to PR NewsWire, the Basketball Cop Foundation sponsored the court’s construction, and White cut the ribbon at the grand opening.
ILC has seen the arrest of three people for child sexual abuse. (1) former Ignite School of Ministry (ISM) student/former volunteer/former employee convicted child molester Gabriel Hemenez; (2) head pastor Mark Vega’s son, alleged rapist Christian Vargas; and (3) former associate pastor Jose Cruz’s son, alleged statutory rapist Noel Cruz.
Hemenez and Vargas were arrested in July 2023, and Noel Cruz was arrested in February 2024.
Seven anonymous ILC whistleblowers have reported witnessing and/or experiencing financial frauds, spiritual abuse, sexual abuse, emotional abuse, and the coverup of all the former at ILC. More recently, four former ISM students have come forward with their names to publicly back up the anonymous whistleblowers’ claims. One of the public informants is the sister of a survivor.
On January 15, 2016, White was called out for a complaint of kids playing basketball “loudly.” A dashcam video showed White walking up to one of the kids and saying, “Can you believe someone is calling to complain about kids playing basketball?” The video went viral, and the fame helped White start the Basketball Cop Foundation.
After George Floyd’s murder in 2020, Gainesville native Chanane Jackson posted a video where White is slamming her son into a car. The New York Times reported that “with just a click on Facebook, she set off an uproar that stripped away not only Mr. White’s image as the face of what good neighborhood policing should be but also the assumption.”
The teenager White approached, Aathrell Johnson, told the New York Times his “perception changed” after he saw the video of White slamming Jackson’s son and that he “wouldn’t be surprised if there’s a video of every policeman in the world like that…. It’s what they’re taught.”
White reportedly has said he identified with “some of the struggles of many [of Gainesville’s] Black youth” because he “grew up with a single mother who died of drug addiction at a young age [and] there was never a male role model in his household.”
The Basketball Cop Foundation remains actively registered as a non-profit. White runs the foundation with former GPD Public Information Officer Benjamin Tobias and GPD Officer Rebecca Holcomb.
As legal directors of the Basketball Cop Foundation, White, Holcomb and Tobias are all technically still associating themselves with ILC, as a banner with the Basketball Cop Foundation’s logo remains at ILC’s basketball court today.
