AMERICAN POLICE BEAT: AUGUST 2017 33 S ome law enforce- ment officers and agencies have fig- ured it out and some haven’t. But the truth is that a police department or a sheriff’s office’s Facebook page is an official public record. That’s why some officers and agencies won’t go any- where near the official FB pages and only post on the unofficial ones. The issue at hand is what agencies can do to shut people up on social media after a controversial use of force incident. For instance, just four days after the Texas Rang- ers released details describ- ing the shooting death of a Harker Heights resident, including dash-cam video, the Bell County Sheriff’s Department in Texas start- ed getting hammered on their Facebook page by crit- ics. Now there are questions about the legal- ity of the agen- cy’s attempt at “virtual crowd- control” to prevent people from posting on an agency’s Facebook page. Law enforcement agen- cies’ social media pages are operated by governmental agencies funded by tax- payers. So there’s a First Amendment issue here that the courts have yet to address. After visitors criticized the Sheriff’s Dept., higher- ups decided the best thing to do would be to ban com- ments. “We apologize, but due to a barrage of inconsider- ation from some viewers, and their overwhelming negativity, we are banning comments and video post- ings at this time,” the post read. “We are sorry to the peo- ple who genuinely want to engage in healthy, positive interaction that the nega- tive people have caused this issue. For now, you can private message (even then we will ban the negativity and move on with a smile). Have a good day everyone . . . even our anti-LEO fans.” Most law enforcement agencies are not required to provide the public the opportunity to comment on incidents or performance. But when a state agency censors speech based on content, it’s on a collision course with First Amend- ment rights. And unlike 4th Amend- ment rights that were re- stricted after the attacks of September 11, 2001, the courts and the American people still care very much about freedom of speech and religious expression. As for the case in ques- tion, those who work for the sheriff don’t have much in the way of details. Lt. Donnie Adams, a de- partment spokesman, was unaware of any orders or even the post to ban nega- tive comments. He said he thinks Face- book shut down the com- ments because they were too “anti-police.” He said he didn’t know if Facebook did that auto- matically or if someone at Facebook had to delete the negative comments. “We had a large influx come in with a lot of nega- tive comments,” Adams said. He told reporters with KDH News that there are two Sheriff’s Department employees that monitor and mediate the Facebook page, but he did not want to say who those people were. After an open records request from local media outlets, one newspaper received a typed letter on official depart- ment letterhead that said a Dept. investigator was “unable to determine” if any had been deleted. So what does this mean for your agency and its Face- book page? The truth is, like most things having to do with the Internet and social media, no one really knows. Kelley Shannon is the executive director at the Freedom of Information Foundation of Texas. Usually, she says, if a public agency is running a Facebook page, it has to allow public comments or risk lawsuits. But she says if someone crosses a line, there is “some leeway to take action.” Which of course doesn’t clear anything up, it just adds to the confusion. Ultimately, “if the point of the public forum is to allow free expression . . . there shouldn’t be censor- ship of those comments. Free expression of ideas should not be thwarted,” Shannon said. And there’s the rub. If you let cops and ci- vilians talk to each other anonymously there are obviously going to be com- menters on both sides that can’t act like adults and generally think the internet is place to talk crap about people they hate (or think they hate). If the point of a law en- forcement agency hav- ing a Facebook page is to promote only positive stuff about officers and poli- cies, then banning or de- leting negative comments would seem to make a lot of sense. It’s just a question as to whether or not that’s legal. Odds are we’ll soon find out especially if the police- civilian divide gets worse instead of better as we move forward. Whose page is it? After an open records request from media outlets, one newspaper received a typed letter on official department letterhead that said an investigator was “unable to determine” if any had been deleted. t
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