A MAN who published a Facebook post threatening to kill police officers has avoided immediate jail.

Bradford Crown Court heard that Christopher Blaylock had issues with authority figures and particularly those in uniform and the hierarchy of the police.

Prosecutor Gerald Hendron told the court that on March 7 this year Blaylock wrote a Facebook post directed at West Yorkshire Police.

It read: “So they wanna come take my freedom again over bull***t charges. West Yorkshire Police don’t be crying when I make Derik Bird and Raoul Moat look like amateurs.

"You came and picked on me. When I pick on you back, don’t cry when I’m spraying you and your fools down with a Kalashnikov. You started it, you came at me, now you want my life and freedom again, keep it up, and I’ll finish it fools.”

Bird was a lone gunman who shot and killed 11 people in Cumbria in 2010. Moat was the former bodybuilder who shot one man and wounded two other people, also in 2010.

When Blaylock was arrested on March 10 he said, “I can genuinely see why Birdy and Moat did what they did.”

In a subsequent interview with police, he said he had 19 different Facebook accounts and challenged officers to prove he was the user.

He said his grievances were not with individual police officers but with “the hierarchy” of the police.

He said he believed the police were “pushing” him and that he would rather not harm anyone but that he might be pushed into it.

Blaylock, 39, of Woodhouse Walk, Keighley, later pleaded guilty to sending a communication threatening death or serious harm.

The court heard that he had a lengthy criminal record including convictions for arson, possession of a blade, affray, burglary and assault, breach of a restraining order, actual bodily harm, assaulting an emergency worker, and assault of a police officer and making threats to kill.

Mitigating, Olivia Fraser said Blaylock accepted that he had a distorted view of how to deal with emotional management and when unable to regulate his emotions they “bubble over”.

She said he did not intend to harm anyone and that the Facebook post was “very generalised”.

Sentencing Blaylock to 24 months imprisonment suspended for two years, His Honour Judge Colin Burn accepted there had been “significant behavioural issues” in the past, but that Blaylock required “structured intervention” to assist with a personality disorder.

He described the suspended sentence as “a single one-off window of opportunity” that could allow Blaylock to avoid violent offending in the future.

He also ordered him to undertake 35 rehabilitation activity requirement days.