Author Archives: melissa.colas

I came across this article in the New York Times about police officers and their social networking pages such as Facebook. Many of these officers are being reprimanded for the information they put on their pages that is work related. Some of these comments have given some police headquarters and police officials a bad reputation. Now it is easy to say that the officers first amendment right is being violated. However, their actions are compromising other individuals and not just themselves. I think that if this is in fact true in which people are seeing the kind of officers being hired then it makes precincts look bad and people will start to begin protesting against them. In some cases, officers post up photos of crime scenes or themselves posing with guns. There are also obscene comments from officers such as this one: “These people should have died when they were young, anyway, I’m just doing them a favor,”according to an officer speaking of a homeless man on the street. who was beaten by police. I think that the police department heads have every right to censor this information because one person makes a reflection on the whole precinct. Although people do not like to be censored, a job in police enforcement should allow every one to feel equally safe and protected by police officers. In these cases, it is easy to see that people are discriminated against and then society will take a look at who hired them. Every employer is liable to watch their backs when their reputation is at risk. As a waitress at Applebees, i have even had my employers tell us that we need to be respectful to people anywhere around the region because if they come in the restaurant they will recognize whether we did something bad or good around them if they remember us. Therefore, even in a place where people may think it is not that serious to watch your actions such as working in a restaurant it is. Law enforcement should have much more stricter rules as well because their duty is to be protective of its citizens. I would feel really uncomfortable finding out that an officer in my town would post such things on their Facebook because i would want to know how many more officers feel the same way or have done the same thing. The head officials are not telling officers to not post anything at all, but they are simply making sure they watch what they are putting out for public eyes to see. If the officers want to protect themselves, they should not allow people to know who they are employed by on Facebook or what goes on work related. In any case, they should become familiar with Facebook’s privacy settings and learn how to separate their work lives from their personal lives.