Cops Who Attended ‘Stop The Steal’ Rally Ask US Supreme Court To Keep Their Names Out Of The News
A handful of Seattle police officers who had nothing better to do on January 6, 2021 than support a man whose followers spent the next several hours assaulting cops and committing a number of federal crimes are asking the Supreme Court to prevent having their names disclosed to public records requesters.
Using “John Doe” pseudonyms, they sued over whether the investigation into their activities should be made public. The Washington State Supreme Court ruled in February that they can be identified and that they haven’t shown that public release of their names violates their right to privacy. The state supreme court denied reconsideration earlier this month and lawyers for the four officers submitted a petition to the U.S. Supreme Court, asking that the names remain protected during their legal challenge.
Four officers who attended events in the nation’s capital on the day of an insurrection claimed they are protected under the state’s public records law. They say they did nothing wrong and that revealing their names would violate their privacy.
Two officers (who are married to each other), Caitlin and Alexander Everett have already had their names made public by the Seattle PD. This followed an investigation that found the couple not only attended the “Stop the Steal” rally, but crossed police barriers and stood near the Capitol building. Since both actions violated the law, their names were made public.
The same can’t be said about the remaining four officers, which likely means they’re in the right. The Washington State Supreme Court ruled the names could be released without violating their right to privacy. After all, they’re not only public employees but they attended a public event where anyone could have identified them.
However, that’s not the totality of the equation here. The officers do make some good points in their Supreme Court petition [PDF], chiefly that being a public employee doesn’t mean losing access to your civil liberties.
Although the public is entitled to be informed concerning the workings of its government, and the SPD is entitled to investigate potential wrongdoing on the part of its officers, this entitlement cannot be unlimited and inflated into general power to invade the constitutional privacy rights of individuals. Core components of personal identity, such as political activities, are deeply private and not the proper subject of a public records request. Police officers are entitled to the same constitutional protections as all other Americans, and do not forfeit those rights by merely attending a political rally.
While most of us would certainly prefer cops to be less supportive of someone who clearly has no real respect for the rule of law, the fact that this rally turned into an insurrection doesn’t necessarily make simply attending the rally itself some sort of criminal act.
And as much as I’d like to see every cop who supports convicted felons with autocratic urges named and shamed, that’s not how civil rights work. Attending a rally is political speech, which is one of those things we’re definitely supposed to protect and respect in the United States under the Constitution.
Allowing this order to expose the names of officers who engaged in political speech during their off-hours would allow people and public entities to punish officers who did far better things with their time, like attend rallies in support of LGBTQ+ people or in opposition of government violence. They should be able to do the same things other Americans can. It’s only when they cross the line into lawlessness that they should be subject to public exposure for their actions.
In these cases, nothing has been proven other than attendance. And I don’t think that should be where the bar is set, not if we want public employees to feel comfortable supporting issues and ideas that might make most of their co-workers uncomfortable.
And let’s not mistake my statements here as supportive for burying the names of officers who are accused of misconduct while engaging in their official duties. That’s something else completely. No one can plausibly argue that misconduct (proven or not) is something that’s protected by the Constitution. Even if officers are cleared of wrongdoing, they should not be shielded from public oversight by, you know, actual members of the public. In this case, however, none of this happened while in uniform or while the officers were on the clock. Seattle PD officials may be displeased some officers got that close to an insurrection, but unless they actively engaged in wrongdoing, they did nothing more than waste their First Amendment rights on a demagogue who doesn’t really care about them or their rights.