An on-campus police officer for a Florida middle school is under a criminal investigation because of his MySpace account.
One of the people on his friends list had a link on their profile that led to an Internet porn site. Gulf Middle School resource officer John Nohejl is being investigated by the New Port Richey Police Department and the Florida attorney general’s cyber crimes unit for making the site available to underage children.
The St. Petersburg Times reports,” kids could navigate from Officer John’s page on the social networking site to ‘Amateur Match Free Sex’ in just three clicks.” The links have since been removed.
Cybersafety “is the attorney general’s highest priority,” said Sandy Copes, the attorney general’s spokeswoman. “I am sure the attorney general would be extremely concerned if a member of the trusted law enforcement community was either inadvertently or directly placing students at risk to being exposed to inappropriate content.”
Both the police department and the school principal had given Nohejl permission to use MySpace as a way to connect with students. Lauren Weinstein of People for Internet Responsibility points to a double standard concerning the investigation of Nohejl.
“And golly, it looks like the school involved has its own indirect link contents problems, too. Gulf Middle School’s ‘Resources’ page links to a variety of clip art sites, and they link to … well … let’s just say that the entire Internet opens up at that stage.”
“I’m curious as to why the authorities in Florida are so quick to investigate a school employee for indirect link contents, while obviously the school itself — which has a ‘We can accept no responsibility for content on any pages linked’ notice on their resources page — presumably feels that it should be immune to such investigations related to their own official Web site.”
