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This Group Compiled Police Officers' Offensive Facebook Posts; Now Departments are Taking Action

posted by martyb on Friday June 21 2019, @09:36AM   
from the Thin-blue-racist-line dept.

aristarchus writes:

Facebook may be trying to censor hate-speech, but others are putting it to good use.

From CNN

Law enforcement agencies in Dallas and Florida on Thursday became the latest to announce they are investigating allegations some of their employees made offensive comments on Facebook after a watchdog group compiled screenshots of the posts and shared them in an online database.

The screenshots of the public posts, published in the Plain View Project's online database, purport to show officers or police department employees making hateful or racist remarks.

[...] Since its founding in 2017, the Plain View Project says it has compiled images of more than 5,000 social media posts and comments by more than 3,500 current and former police officers in eight jurisdictions throughout the US.
Researchers obtained rosters of police officers and then looked them up on Facebook, according to the project's website.

After examining the profiles to confirm they belonged to police officers, they reviewed public posts and comments to see if they would "undermine public trust and confidence in police."

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Original Submission

• Re:Counter Re:Counter (Score: 4, Interesting) by Thexalon on Friday June 21 2019, @07:51PM (1 child)

  by Thexalon (636) on Friday June 21 2019, @07:51PM (#858647)

  I think the fact that they're advocating serious criminal acts, while at the same time holding a job that is supposedly about upholding the law, suggests that they are in the wrong line of work, and I don't object to them being forced to change careers.

  --
  The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.

  Parent

  Starting Score:	1		point
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  Insightful=1, Interesting=1, Total=2
  Extra 'Interesting' Modifier		0
  Karma-Bonus Modifier		+1
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• Re:Counter (Score: 2) by krishnoid on Friday June 21 2019, @10:08PM

  by krishnoid (1156) on Friday June 21 2019, @10:08PM (#858672)

  Exactly! You [soylentnews.org] and the other commenter [soylentnews.org] have it dead right. If you advocate breaking the law, you need to work somewhere other than law enforcement.

  Seriously, what are these people thinking -- that's what the legislature's for. Plus you don't even have to break laws -- you can just rewrite them to match your funding sources. A little bread and circuses, fud, and spin, all judiciously applied, then wait until something else dominates the news cycle, and there you go.

  Parent