With more and more law enforcement departments becoming active on social media, some are finding that managing their pages could come with legal ramifications.
The American Civil Liberties Union of Indiana filed a lawsuit last week that alleges the Beech Grove Police Department removed critical comments from its Facebook page, according to The Indianapolis Star.
Kymberly Quick and Deborah Mays-Miller claim the police department deleted their comments and blocked them from posting on the page in the future. One of Quick's posts that the department deleted questioned whether officials were posting accurate crime statistics.
Following the filing of the lawsuit, the Beech Grove Police Department shut down its Facebook page entirely on Wednesday.
Beech Grove City Attorney Craig Wiley says he believes the city has a "constitutional basis" to defend itself against the lawsuit, but that the city is currently negotiating with the ACLU because of the cost of litigation.
David Orentlicher, a constitutional law professor at the Indiana University Robert H. McKinney School of Law in Indianapolis, told the newspaper that he disagrees with Wiley. He said that if a government agency creates a social media page that allows public comment, it cannot remove comments because they are perceived as being critical
"There's no requirement that they create this page, but once they create it and open it up for public comment, they can't discriminate based on the comment," he said, adding that deleting inappropriate comments is acceptable. "If they were just removing obscenities … that's OK. If the only offensive messages they remove are critical, and they overlook the ones that are positive, that would be a problem."
Indiana Gov. Mike Pence was criticized in 2013 when The Indianapolis Star reported that constituents believed their comments were being deleted from his official Facebook page
Wiley said the city plans to work with the ACLU with the hope of reinstating the Facebook page, possibly in a form that does not allow the public to comment.
