Now the Eureka Police Department wants to be your Friend. Yup, Facebook — www.facebook.com/eurekapd.
There you’ll find what you’d expect to find : the wan, spooky scraggled faces of wanted suspects, news releases, and pics of cute Mounted Patrol horses, smashed cars, cats and other such fun stuff.
Says the EPD’s news release on its new gig:
We believe that this will be an effective way for EPD to disseminate information and create another avenue for us to hear the concerns of, and communicate with, the citizens of Eureka.
Now get to tweetin’, Blue Friend! Arcata’s police do it. Boulder‘s police do it. So do Boston’s. And Portland‘s — heck, Portland’s even got a fake police twitter feed. Samples from the fakester:
Wow, you can’t even taste vodka when you mix it with coffee! 10:06 AM Jun 15th via web
Sometimes when I’m bored I squirt ketchup into the backseat of other officer’s cruisers. 4:23 PM Jun 7th via web
This article appears in Los Hechados.
What about HCSO?
So they are using tax dollars to pay someone to manage the Facebook page? What line item in the budget does that come from? Do they have the rights to post photos from car wrecks? Isn’t that in invasion of privacy?
Car wrecks are a matter of privacy for you?
Actually, Puhleese, they probably have at least two people involved in social networking @ around $24k/year each, so costing us about $4,000 per month as a safe estimate.
But what they’ll do is similar to what the local commercial marijuana growers do when they decide to throw a new quad in their 4×4 truck. Whereas the grower says to himself “all I gotta do is grow another pound” the police department says “all we gotta do is bust three more people for DUI’s” or set up a useless sting operation or something.
It’s amazing that the Journal staff hasn’t picked up on how overpayed and overstaffed the Eureka police department is, or that nobody among their ranks has chosen (or is brave enough) to report on the matter. Didn’t the fact that they bought a bunch of brand new sports cars clue them in? Did anybody else notice in the recent Journal article about search warrants, how the police department conveniently lost the reporters’ request for information regarding income from seizures? Does anybody else find it difficult to find their budget and expenses online? Shouldn’t that be a matter of public record, easily accessible?
I’m glad to have read recently that somebody involved in local politics suggested cutting their budget by $1,000,000 dollars…yes, that’s one MILLION dollars…to make up for the financial crunch. Ask yourself what other local entity could even humor the idea of taking such a blow? Ask yourself how many local entities would love to be in a position of receiving a million dollars per year in the first place? It’s so politically correct nowadays to blindly support the men in blue. It’s costing everybody…literally.