Leigh Maibes is a St. Louis-based real estate agent.
Unrelatedly, Maibes has been actively tweeting—under the alias
@stacksizshort—about
recent events in nearby Ferguson, Missouri. But when some of her
criticisms of area police tactics offended Officer Keith Novara, he
called Maibes’ employers to tattle on her.
In a conversation Maibes recorded and posted to YouTube, Novara
admits to calling and texting her boss to warn about her Twitter
activity. “Yeah I was just letting the city businessmen know, in
the city, that if their phones were blowing up that’s what it was
from,” Novara says.
But if her employers’ phones were blowing up because of her
Twitter activity, wouldn’t they already be aware of this?
Considering that Novara is a 21st century human being who
ostensibly understands how phones work, his rationale reeks of
bullshit.
Maybe Novara was hoping to get Maibes in trouble. Maybe he was
just trying to stop her from further tweeting. But whatever his
aspirational outcome, calling in his official capacity as a St.
Louis police offer to inform Maibes’ boss of her completely
legal, unrelated-to-work activity seems an awful lot like
criminal intimidation and harassment.
The video (below) of Maibes’ call with Novara is both
infuriating and wryly amusing as he offers a litany of vague and
nonsensical justifications. He was compelled to act, you see,
because of her “inciteful” tweets, which were contrary to “the
neighborhood ownership model”. He doesn’t “understand what (her)
point is,” because he “was not in violation of any law.”
“It doesn’t constitute police harassment or intimidation to stop
my activism work?” asks Maibes.
“No, not at all,” Novara responds. In fact, it’s Maibes who
should be ashamed, really. “You think that your tweets were
appropriate and everything is fine then as far as what you say
against police and all that?” he asks.
Maibes filed a formal complaint, and Novara has since been
placed under investigation (though not suspended) by the St.
Louis Police Department,
according to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. He’s being
represented by the St. Louis Police Officers Association, which
insists Novara’s actions were protected First Amendment
speech.
“The Association has hired an attorney that specializes in First
Amendment rights to represent Officer Novara,” said the union’s
business manager, Jeff Roorda, in a chilling statement. Roorda
continued:
It is confounding to us as an organization of law enforcement
professionals that apologists for the so-called ‘peaceful
protestors’ in Ferguson and the Shaw neighborhood defend throwing
bricks, bottles and rocks at police officers as ‘freedom
of speech or freedom of expression’. Then, those very same
people feign righteous indignation when a police officer who is fed
up with the corrosive, anti-police rhetoric that this particular
agitator has made in a public forum on social media, exercises his
freedom of speech and freedom of expression in a truly peaceful
manner.
(…) Police Officers are not second-class citizens. They enjoy
First Amendment rights and every other right that is enjoyed by
every other citizens and we will aggressively defend those rights
to our last breath.
This is clearly a First Amendment issue, just not in
the way the police union seems to think it is. Lawyer and blogger
Scott Greenfield notes that “wearing a badge doesn’t forfeit
the free speech of the person,” and had Novara merely called
Maibes’ employer as a griping citizen it would be a different
matter. But that’s not what he did. Greenfield continues:
Rather, (the call) came from Police Officer Keith Novara, and
the speech of a person who presents himself in his official
governmental capacity is no longer the individual’s free speech,
but the official person’s speech. And the latter is not free.(…)Novara’s “exercise” of free speech, behind his official
capacity as a police officer, was clearly intended as
intimidation.
“If a government actor is retaliating against someone who is
engaged in First Amendment activity, that is not lawful,” Jeffrey
Mittman, executive director for the ACLU of Missouri, told
the Post-Dispatch.
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