WASHINGTON — Saying the country could no longer afford to leave the emotional safety of its elected officials to chance, a coalition of police departments announced Thursday the creation of a national Feelings Crimes Division, a specialized unit that will respond to hurt feelings within minutes, provided the feelings belong to someone with a city email address.
"For too long, our officials have been out there on Facebook with nothing but a comment filter and a communications director," said Commander Gail Brenner-Hoyt, the division's inaugural director, standing in front of a banner that read TO PROTECT AND TO BE VALIDATED. "Today that ends. If someone says something mean about a mayor, a council member or a parking director, we will be at that person's door before the mayor finishes reading it out loud to his wife."
Brenner-Hoyt stressed that the division will make no arrests. "Nobody is getting arrested," she said. "We just want to talk. At your house. Tonight. Two of us. You'll know which car."
The division's founding document, a 212-page manual titled Just A Conversation, lays out its legal basis. Since the Supreme Court's 1969 ruling in Brandenburg v. Ohio, speech advocating force or lawbreaking can be punished only if it is aimed at inciting "imminent lawless action" and is likely to produce it. The manual keeps the standard and changes one word. Officers will now act on any post that risks "imminent lawless feelings," defined as any emotion experienced by a public official between the hours of 6 a.m. and midnight.
The division traces its origins to January, when two Miami Beach detectives visited a resident to discuss a Facebook comment about the mayor. The police chief said at the time that he had ordered a "brief, voluntary contact" because he was worried the remarks could prompt others to act. FIRE, the free speech group, called the visit "an egregious abuse of power," and the legal director of the ACLU of Florida said the post was protected and that it was "not a close question." Brenner-Hoyt said she read all three statements carefully and found them "very hurtful," and that two of her officers would be stopping by to talk about them.
Under the new system, every post is assigned a score in Hurt Units, a measure developed by the division's analytics team and a monitoring vendor that asked not to be named, because naming it would be hurtful. Calling an official's policy "bad" is worth 2 Hurt Units. Calling the official "bad" is worth 6. A single clown emoji is 9, and three clown emojis in a row, which the manual calls a "Clown Triad," automatically dispatches two detectives and a supervisor who "has a calming presence." The highest score of all is reserved for posts that are accurate. "Opinions we can live with," Brenner-Hoyt said. "But when someone quotes the official's own voting record back at him, that's premeditated."
Charge Your Post 👮
Draft a post about a public official, or pick one of ours. The division will tell you what it is charging you with before you've even hit send. Saves everyone a drive.
Charges are not crimes and cannot be prosecuted. They are kept in a file that does not exist, in a cabinet the division declined to describe. Praise of public officials is reviewed under the same system and is never charged, though officers may still stop by to say thanks.
The country is not the first to try this. Police in England and Wales have recorded roughly 133,000 "non-crime hate incidents" since 2014, by one widely cited count, logging legal speech that someone found upsetting. The British government has since moved to rein the system in, and London's Metropolitan Police said it would stop investigating such incidents. Brenner-Hoyt said American departments had bought the program secondhand "at a very good price," and described it as "barely used, one previous owner, a little sad."
"Britain had a crime that was not a crime and decided it was a mistake," said Lionel Okonkwo-Reyes, a constitutional law professor at a university that asked not to be named, in case it got a visit. "We looked at that and said, what if the mistake had a division?"
Officers will not need to read every post themselves. Research by the Brennan Center for Justice has found that companies selling social media monitoring tools to law enforcement already market features such as sentiment analysis, which the division says will let it "know how a post feels before the official does." The software flags posts in three categories: Negative, Very Negative, and Accurate. In a pilot program, it also flagged a third-grader's essay titled "Why My Town Needs a Library," which the division called "a cry for help addressed to the wrong agency."
The division will also take reports from the public. Any resident may file a Feelings Report through a new online portal. Response times will vary depending on whose feelings were hurt. Feelings belonging to an elected official will be answered within 20 minutes. Feelings belonging to a police chief will be answered before they are felt. Feelings belonging to a resident will be logged, reviewed and forwarded to the resident, who will be advised to "develop a thicker skin, which is protected speech."
File A Feelings Report 💔
Was someone mean online? Tell us whose feelings were hurt and how. All reports are taken equally seriously, in the order of the reporter's job title.
Whose feelings were hurt?The "Actually threatened" option is routed to the regular police, who handle real threats under the law that existed before this division. Wait times for that line are longer, because the detectives are busy.
Civil liberties groups were quick to criticize the announcement, and the division was quick to visit them. By Thursday afternoon, officers had held brief, voluntary conversations with four advocacy organizations, two newspaper columnists and a man in Ohio who replied to the division's launch post with the single word "yikes." He was not under arrest, officers confirmed. He has since changed his reply to "thank you for your service," which the software rated as Very Negative.
The division has also published a set of rights, to be read aloud at the start of every visit. "You have the right to remain silent," it begins, "and we would prefer it. Anything you say can and will be screenshotted. You have the right to an attorney, but think about how that looks."
Asked what would happen if an official said something that hurt a resident's feelings, Brenner-Hoyt looked confused, then said the division's mandate covered only "feelings with standing." She said residents who felt hurt by an elected official already had a remedy. "It's called voting," she said, "and we would never interfere with that, as long as nobody posts about it."
At press time, the division had opened an investigation into this article, which its software scored at 4,100 Hurt Units. Two detectives were reported to be on their way to the HuckFinn newsroom to make clear that nobody was in trouble.
Reader Comments (20, after review)