Category: Aspiring OEMs

Look out, sheriff! An over-the-top video you made two years ago has returned to bite your fanny like a gator going for a chihuahua.

Lake County’s top lawman Peyton Grinnell has long since regretted his video warning to heroin dealers that came across more ‘ISIS thug’ than ‘community protector’ and backfired on the department. Flanked by deputies wearing masks and bulletproof vests, a stern Grinnell warned: “We are coming for you. Run.”

But there’s no out-running the internet.

That 2017 video is the reason the Lake County Sheriff’s Office ended up in national news this week as one of only eight police agencies across the United States in a study of officers posting comments on Facebook that encouraged violence, disparaged and mocked Mexicans, women, blacks and Muslims and celebrated the Confederate flag.

In general, the study concluded, the public postings by officers created real reasons for some folks not to trust the departments.

“It’s embarrassing,” a whipped-looking Grinnell said in an interview.

It is. But there is more to this story.

The Plain View project, started by Philadelphia lawyer Emily Baker-White, compiled a searchable database, which included posts from that city’s police officers, along with others from Dallas, St. Louis, Phoenix, York, Pa., Twin Falls, Id. and Denison, Tx.– and Lake County.

The database collected more than 5,000 Facebook posts from 3,500 Facebook accounts of current and former officers in the eight departments. Lake County’s share accounted for 89 of those posts — from 14 current and seven former employees, most of whom had been fired.

An analysis of the database was written by a non-profit online Chicago news organization called Injustice Watch, and the story also appeared in Buzzfeed after a deal with the New York Times to publish the material fell through for reasons neither Injustice Watch nor the Times would discuss.

Still, stories about the disgusting posts reverberated across news outlets nationwide as police administrations opened internal affairs investigations and started to study what their officers had to say.

Some of the posts and memes clearly crossed the line into hate speech, which ought to trouble any police department anywhere, regardless of whether the First Amendment protects such opinions. No place in America needs police officers who take hatred and bias onto the street with them when their shift begins. Grinnell, for example, said that he expects his deputies to be held to a higher standard than the public, and he is right.

In Lake, the most revolting posts, those calling the prophet Muhammad a child molester, warning women to shut up while men are talking, making fun of blacks and transgender people, disparaging liberals, urging gays to take pills called “Gay-away” and congratulating a student who kicked a chair from underneath another who declined to stand to pledge the flag, all came from a former corrections officer who retired more than six years ago.

That hater’s posts alone accounted for 36 percent of all comments from Lake.

The sheriff’s office opened internal investigations on Deputy Jason Williams, a school resource officer at East Ridge High School, and Cpl. Robert Bedgood, a supervisor in crime scene investigations, after being contacted by Injustice Watch.

Williams’ three posts all came from three years ago. In one, he shared without comment a meme depicting a heavily-armed officer in a mask with text saying, “Some Men are Morally Opposed to Violence. They are Protected by Men Who Are Not.”

He also shared a meme of a tractor-trailer with a bloodied front bumper and the remark, “Just Drove through Arizona. Didn’t see any Protesters” along with his own comment, “Love this!!”

And the third was a meme looking down the business end of a gun with the text: “Wrong Bathroom. My daughter will be done in a min…”

Bedgood’s comments were older. Eight years ago, he posted a map to a Winter Park store for eyeglasses, remarking that it was so “hood” that he wouldn’t return.

And seven years ago, he posted a picture of a lime-green car with lettering across the back window saying, “1-800-Choke-a-Hoe” and joked that it was his “new motto.”

Are these comments in good taste? Not hardly. Should deputies be posting that kind of “humor”? They should not — the sheriff’s office has a broad policy forbidding deputies to “disparage” anyone. But are such comments a reason to lose a career in law enforcement?

That’s for Grinnell to decide. Investigators will be looking over posts from 12 other current deputies to see whether they believe the sheriff’s policies about social media were violated.

Consider that last week, a corrections officer with 19 years in the department resigned after acknowledging that he told an inmate to hang up a telephone and get his “black ass” back to his cell, and later remarked to another African-American that the government probably was taking care of his children while he was serving time, like all “those people.” Detention Deputy Adam Dufresne said he was referring to criminals, not any particular race.

Some of the posts cited by the Plain View project were baffling.

Lt. Michael Marden posted this in 2010: “Trying to rally the guys and put some more people in jail tonight.”

Grinnell said, “Sounds to me like he was doing his job.”

Indeed. Around these parts, that comment deserves applause, not a place on a list of violence-hungry, out-of-control cops. But even a seemingly innocuous comment such as that can be interpreted in a sinister way by people who live in neighborhoods that have had bad police experiences, one expert said.

The story that accompanied the Plain View database stated that the cities were chosen to get a variety in geography and department size. The reporter who wrote the story, Emily Hoerner, said she did not know how they were picked beyond those criteria.

Baker-White said she prioritized communities “that had on-going conversations about police” and whether they could be trusted. She said she chose Lake after seeing the controversial video made by Grinnell and his staff in 2017.

This project could have gained more solid credibility if the agencies had been chosen randomly — here’s betting the results would have been very much the same — or if readers had been told that they had been targeted. Posts that are close to a decade old and those that come from fired employees also raise questions about the methods used.

After all, this trust thing — it goes all ways.