NYPD Facebook probe raises free-speech question

NEW YORK (AP):

THE FACEBOOK group was titled "No More West Indian Day Detail," referring to police patrol for a raucous annual Brooklyn parade.

Sprinkled among the frustrations aired about regulating the crowded, loud, often-violent event were comments that were more offensive. Some called the parade, held in a predominantly black neighbourhood, "ghetto training," and a "scheduled riot." Others referred to participants as savages.

The West Indian Day Parade celebrates the culture of the Caribbean islands and is one of the city's largest outdoors events. Food carts with spicy dishes and fresh fruit crowd a stately parkway and dancers shimmy wearing revealing feathered costumes.

But it is often surrounded by violence. Following the parade this year, a woman was shot to death while sitting on her stoop with her daughter, as police exchanged gunfire nearby with an armed man who had opened fire on another person moments before. And others were shot to death during celebrations in 2003 and 2005.

"Maybe next year they should hold it on Riker's Island," one of the Facebook posts read, referring to the city's main jail.

At least 20 such comments made on the page may have come from police officers, New York Police Department officials said last week. Internal affairs detectives are interviewing officers under oath and getting subpoenas for computer records. Departmental charges could be brought, Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly said.

He said the department can discipline behaviour determined to be unbecoming of a police officer or detrimental to the service - and that includes online outbursts.

'Disturbing'

"It is disturbing when anyone denigrates a community with hateful speech. It is unacceptable when police officers do it," Kelly said in a statement.

But the posts, however embarrassing or outrageous, also raise a First Amendment issue about whether officers should watch what they say, online and off.

The Facebook group, which had more than a thousand supporters, has been taken offline, but copies of the posts were made public by lawyers who used the remarks in the trial of a Brooklyn man who was arrested before last year's parade. The majority of the posts centred on concern about violence at the parade, frustration about what they said was unchecked lawlessness, while other city parades staged in more notable locales, like Fifth Avenue in Manhattan, were policed more fervently.