By Erica Goode
The International Herald Tribune
ALBUQUERQUE, NM — Trey Economidy, a police officer in Albuquerque, New Mexico, realizes that he should have thought harder before listing his occupation on his Facebook profile as ''human waste disposal.’'
After he was involved in a fatal on-duty shooting in February, a local television station dug up the Facebook page. Officer Economidy was placed on desk duty, and last month the Albuquerque Police Department announced a new policy to govern officers’ use of social networking sites.
Social networking tools like Facebook and Twitter can be valuable assets for law enforcement agencies, helping them to alert the public, seek information about crimes and gather evidence about the backgrounds of criminal suspects. But the Internet can also get police departments into trouble.
Public gaffes like Officer Economidy’s - his cynical job description on Facebook was ''extremely inappropriate and a lapse in judgment on my part,’' he said last week in an e-mail - are only one of the risks. A careless posting on a networking site, law enforcement experts say, can endanger an officer’s safety, as it did in Santa Monica, California, last year when the police went to great lengths to conceal a wounded officer’s identity and location, only to have a retired officer inadvertently reveal them on Facebook.
And defense lawyers increasingly scour social networking sites for evidence that could impeach a police officer’s testimony. In one case in New York, a jury dismissed a weapons charge against a defendant after learning that the arresting officer had listed his mood on MySpace as ''devious’’ and wrote on Facebook that he was watching the film ''Training Day,’' which stars Denzel Washington as a corrupt police officer, to ''brush up on proper police procedure.’'
The problem is serious enough that police departments across the United States are scrambling to develop rules to govern what officers can and cannot do online.
''This is something that all the police chiefs around the country, if you’re not dealing with it, you better deal with it,’' said Mark A. Marshall, chief of police in Smithfield, Virginia, and the president of the International Association of Chiefs of Police, which has developed its own model policy.
Most social media policies in the United States try to balance a police department’s interests with the officers’ constitutional right to free speech. Many include prohibitions against posting any statements that could discredit or reflect badly on a department, that illustrate reckless behavior or that disparage people based on race, religion or sexual orientation. Posting crime scene photos or other evidence from criminal cases online is also prohibited by most policies.
Others go further. Albuquerque’s policy, for example, prohibits officers from identifying themselves as employees of the police department or posting photos of departmental insignia - badges, uniforms, cruisers - without permission. And a recent policy by the police in Pueblo, Colorado, bans gossiping online with outsiders about department affairs.
Police officials say that U.S. courts have generally upheld restrictions on the speech of government employees when the speech is job related.
But David L. Hudson Jr., a scholar at the First Amendment Center at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee, said the lower courts were still sorting out the implications of the Supreme Court’s decisions involving job-related speech.
''The question of when employees can be disciplined for off-duty speech is hazy,’' he said. ''Part of our core nature is what we do for a living, and to prohibit somebody from engaging in any kind of expression related to their job is arguably too broad.’'
The Albuquerque policy has met some resistance from the rank and file. Joey Sigala, president of the Albuquerque Police Officers’ Association, said that requiring officers to get permission before posting pictures involving department insignia, for instance, made it difficult to share news about awards or honors spontaneously with family and friends. ''They’re taking away the ability to demonstrate the good, as well as the bad,’' he said.
Ray Schultz, the Albuquerque police chief, said that department officials researched policies from around the nation before developing their own.
''You need to get a handle on this very quickly, because this has the potential to damage the reputation of the organization and also adversely affect you in the courtroom,’' he said, adding that some social media sites appeared to be ''like the bathroom wall of 20 years ago, except now the entire world can see it.’'
Copyright 2011 International Herald Tribune