Nearly 20 employees of the New York Police Department have faced discipline in connection with the posting of racist or derogatory comments on a Facebook page about revelers at the 2011 West Indian American Day Parade, a heavily policed annual celebration in Brooklyn on Labor Day weekend, a spokesman for the department said Wednesday.

The comments referred to “savages” and “animals,” and one poster wrote, “Let them kill each other.” The Facebook page, titled “No More West Indian Day Detail,” elicited comments from more than 150 people, many of whose names matched those of police officers.

After an article appeared in December in The New York Times about the online remarks, the police commissioner, Raymond W. Kelly, vowed to conduct an internal affairs investigation, saying that 20 offensive comments “were associated with names that match those of police officers.”

On Wednesday, the department’s chief spokesman, Paul J. Browne, said 17 people had since been disciplined; four of those are officers facing pending departmental trials on charges of “conduct prejudicial to the good order of the Police Department,” he said.